"It helps take care of your biological needs, like making it so you don't need to eat or drink and can get by on less sleep, but of course that makes it easier to overwork yourself and doesn't effect anything besides biology. After I first got mine I spent a month miserable because the only time I would end up eating meals was when I was meeting people over dinners, though thankfully that at least was easy to fix."

"Huh. I'd really like to need less sleep but 'get by' doesn't sound like the most glowing recommendation."

"The way the magic works, it's supposed to make you only need two hours of sleep to get the benefits of normally sleeping eight hours, but it's not a perfect substitute since it doesn't do anything about how tired you are 22 hours after you woke up. You can move around your sleep schedule, but that gets to be a hassle when you want to be asleep in the middle of the day when you need to do something, so I mostly end up drinking tea when I work in the evenings and calling it good enough. And if you're not careful, your extra time can turn into extra workload and then you have even more stuff to get done but you have to do it tired. I'm told it's also troublesome if you have other rings you want to wear, but not being an adventurer I don't have that problem."

"Gosh. Thank you for catching me up on what will probably be the first of many ignorances. Can you introduce me to the others - I've yet to meet the Baroness or Captain Harmattan or Wilcer Garms."

"I don't know the captain or quartermaster myself, but I can introduce you to the baroness at least. Her family's lands are on the south end of Mendev, which usually implies they're less enthusiastic about expanding the war effort, but she's something of a patriot and neutral good besides, not that the latter is surprising for an Aasimar. She caught the tail end of the last crusade and has done some campaigning at the barrier in the years since, supposed to be pretty good at taking the fight to them across the barrier when they overexpose themselves, so it's an easy guess why she's the queen's choice for crusading. She  has some sorcery, but mostly the impressive thing about it is she can bless people like a cleric, since she usually fights in close. When she stops by the court, she's a staunch member of Queen Galfrey's faction, but she usually deputizes one of her cousins for it."

As she talks, Nurah leads Kybele over to where the Baroness is speaking with Ramien, a glass of wine in each of their hands.

"Baroness! Allow me to introduce our new Knight-Commander, Kybele. She's looking to get better acquainted with her new colleagues - perhaps this calls for the story of your face-off with a rift wyrm?"

The baroness covers her face with the hand not holding her glass, though it fails to completely hide a grin.

"Please no, Nurah, it was bad enough back when it first happened and it was all anyone was willing to talk about. I'd rather talk about literally anything else."

The woman then turns her attention to Kybele, and straightens a bit.

"It's good to meet you, Knight-Commander. I don't suppose there's some topic you are dying to ask about so I can pretend I forgot all about Dendiwhar's suggestion?"

"Oh no, I'll have to warn Iskander not to ask you about it either. What's your second-greatest exploit, then?"

"Alas, foiled by my own failure to specify. Let's see, hmm.... If I had to pick one, it would probably be when I killed Sogmexeth, something like 9 years ago now? I've fought my fair share of more dangerous foes, but he was particularly clever for an incubus and I was only second circle back then, so he was still stronger than I was in terms of personal combat. He was implementing part of Khorramzade's last big push to stop the crusade, which in his case meant trying to break our morale; he would take a strike team of demons after our resupply caravans, and then leave their bodies gruesomely tortured for us to find and the food and weapons we hoped to get totally ruined. Then afterwards he'd go on probing raids, just enough to taunt us with how we couldn't do anything about the attacks, and never committing enough to lose more than a few stragglers. He and his raiding group could all fly, so we didn't have any hope of chasing him down.

"I let him think he was getting to me and that he was making me too mad to think straight, then after a few more days of it I lead a force after him when he retreated from his latest provocation, running up after him on foot as he left. He in turn pretended to be frightened enough to flee outright, but kept below his maximum pace to keep baiting us into moving too far away from our fortifications to retreat and out of range of our archers. Once he'd gotten far enough, he turned right around to try and kill off my people, but what he didn't know was that I had brought a few dozen of our best marksmen with us and hidden them under a silent image of ordinary spearmen, and he didn't notice the deception until it was too late and his vanguard was full of cold iron arrows. He didn't make it out alive, and the rest of his force scattered after that; presumably some other demons picked up most of them for their own forces, but at least Sogmexeth couldn't join them."

"Wow! I'm delighted to have you on board, sounds like I couldn't ask for better."

"Well, there's always the dream of Cyprian deciding to stop wasting his talents fighting brush wars in the river kingdoms and instead coming to help with the real threat. but I hope to be a satisfactory second choice. Who else haven't you met with yet?"

"Harmattan and Garms."

"I can't say I'm friends with either of them, but I have spoken with them before which is likely more than Nurah can say. Let's see about an introduction."

Wilcer Garms is the easier of the two to locate, as he is also currently availing himself of the drinks, though he's significantly tipsier than the Baroness. It's not enough that his words are slurred, but there's visible coloration on his cheeks and it seems to take him a moment or two longer to formulate responses.

"Hullo! Knight-Commander, I'll say, wasn't expecting that when we set out of Nerosyan. Exciting business, that, very exciting. Do you have a, whatchamacallit, coat of arms that I'll need to be displaying?"

"My twin's the artist in the family, he'll have to draw you the symbols I use! I'm not sure any of them are quite a coat of arms in the local tradition but he'll be delighted to figure out how to render them into one."

"Excellent, I'll get right on talking to him about that tomorrow; it takes a while to get those things dyed and produced in quantity, at least if you want them to do a good job. Your brother's name is Iskander, right?"

"That's right! He's over there, in the blue."

"Oh, now that I see him the resemblance is clear. Is there anything you'll expect to need a regular supply of on crusade besides the usual? I understand you use paper but I'm not clear on if that's the kind of thing where you have everything you need or where you need to import a few hundred sheets a month like arrows."

She conjures up another little paper star. "If we're likely to need more income, we can export paper."

That gets his attention, cutting through the haze of alcohol.

"How fast can you make that, and how long does it last? Does it take any limited resources? Is the paper spell quality?"

He cuts himself off.

"Er, feel free to not give details of course if it even might be strategically relevant of course, but even if it's not worth the expense of shipping overland to the Sellen it would be nice not to have to import it, or even send out on any emergency resupplies to recoup a bit of the costs."

"I can make it pretty fast, though I don't know my exact peak. Lasts forever, it's just paper, and nothing but my time. I haven't looked into whether it's spell quality."

 "Then I'll have to see what kind of offers I can get on overland freight. It'll probably add some costs, to have them carrying loads both ways, but if the raw materials aren't a limiting factor there should be a price point they'll move at and still make a profit. Even if some of that income goes into hiring adventurer escorts it's not necessarily a bad thing to have our resupply efforts better defended either... I'll get back to you on that once I've talked to some people about it, and ideally tracked down a wizard to check its use for scrolls and spellbooks. Would you mind making me a stack for that?"

Chunky ream of paper. "That enough?"

"Should be, yes. And wow, that certainly is fast. If that's not your limit, it almost makes me wonder if it could also supply our fuel needs, as much as I cringe at the idea of wasting that much perfectly good paper. Another thing I'll need to run the numbers on..."

He zones out for a bit, trying to think it through, though his light inebriation is making it a bit harder than it needs to be.

"...Probably ought to do that in the morning, actually. Still, I'm certainly feeling more optimistic now."

"It has to be paper, which works fine for tinder but isn't suitable for a longer-burning fire."

"It feels like there ought to be a way to solve that outside of just shoveling in more paper but I confess I have no idea what it is or how feasible it would be. I can't say I've ever imagined a situation where paper would be easier to obtain than wood fuel, or really that anyone else has, not on this scale."