"If everything went smoothly, it would take about three weeks to re-derive it in full, but if I'm willing to settle for something that just functions I might be able to do it in one, though it might not be as good. Researching with you would go much more quickly!"

"I'm sorry if this is obvious, but couldn't you just find someone who already has the spell and learn it from them?"

"She could, but rederiving it is more fun. I don't think either of those is going to work for scouting the ford today, but I would love to help you with it later!" To think that she ever thought Time Enough For Love might not be useful. "For today I think I should stick to one Gate and get all my scouting done in a minute and a half." It's very convenient that she already DFEWed a hawk and will be able to see a lot from high up. While she's thinking about it she DFEWs a bumblebee, for the ultraviolet vision.

"Okay!"

Nenio is still halfway paying attention to the world around her, but the rest of her attention has already gone into figuring out the first steps on reverse engineering Fly. She'd say she couldn't help it, but that would imply there was a reason she would want to try, and for the most part the only thing that can divert Nenio from science is other science.

That's so reasonable but they need to do a bunch of stuff at the same time. She does the Nondetection and the Invisibility and then asks, "Nenio, are you ready to do the illusion on the Gate as soon as it goes up?"

“Yes!”

She puts her hands in the starting position for the somatic components, and prepared to time it to finish exactly alongside Brenda’s casting.

Arueshalae will get her bow ready, then, and enhance it with Gravity Bow before following the transmutation up with Cat's Grace and Eyes of the Falcon. It's not enchanted like her old bow, and the draw weight leaves much to be desired, but between the magic and her knowledge of demonic anatomy it should still let her help a little in a fight. If one of them does try to chase Brenda back the gate, she'll be ready.

And Wenduag will string her own bow, because she's not going to be outdone that easily.

Seelah has her sword out for the same reasons, though she hopes the stealth works well enough that it won't be necessary.

Brenda smiles appreciatively at the backup, makes eye contact with Nenio, and counts down "3, 2, 1, now." The Gate goes up, small and horizontal, and an invisible cloud of glitter drops through it.

An illusion the color of empty sky covers both her and the gate, but to Brenda's True Seeing it look like someone turned the transparency all the way down; it doesn't impede her vision in the slightest even before she finishes flying out of the affected area.

Villareth's Ford is, in a word, old. As a the best location to cross the West Sellen for several hundred miles around, the location has seen use by various sophonts inhabiting Sarkoris and Mendev for over two millenia, and not even the incursion of the worldwound and the displacement of the Kellids was enough to change that. In the third year of the fourth crusade, the Mendevian army constructed a stone redoubt to command the river's western bank and ensure that none of their supply caravans would have to make a contested crossing, and over the years since engineers expanded the strongpoint and set about making the river even easier for heavily laden wagons to cross. When the fourth crusade ended in a bloody stalemate, the position was judged too exposed to house a wardstone and the crusader lines withdrew across the river, leaving it in the hands of the demons.

It's not the largest fortress, nor the most manned; while the structures were clearly designed to retain as much effectiveness as possible even when operated by a skeleton crew, the positioning of lookouts on the wall seems to leave a lot of gaps in their coverage; even if she weren't invisible and flying, it seems likely she could get a small group fairly close to the structure without being noticed. Unfortunately, the structure has been in demonic hands for far less time than Drezen has, and looks to be nearly intact. There are a number of Baphomet's unholy symbols inscribed on the walls, of course, but they don't seem likely to threaten the structural integrity.

Do the holy symbols actually do anything, or are they just graffiti? No way to know; even if she wanted to get close enough for Detect Magic she couldn't cast it without dropping the Gate. She does a quick count of numbers and inventory of visible demon types and quantity and condition of equipment, never getting within a hundred meters of the ground, and then returns the way she came and describes it all to the others. 

(Heh. She went to paradise via flying through a hole in the sky. It's like some kind of Super Mario glitch.)

No demons appear to notice her flying or her gate out, and certainly don’t put it together in time to do anything about it. It’s almost as though countering high level magic is very difficult!

“I doubt any of the sigils are symbol spells; there are definitely demons who know how to do that, but it takes expensive materials to do and there would be more demons there if someone was invested in the fortress.”

“Plus, just leaving symbols out isn’t very good security anyway. They only work at close range, so it’s pretty easy to cover them up or break the wall they’re mounted on. Now, if I was making a puzzle maze…”

"Are puzzle mazes a common thing or just something you think would be awesome?" Because it would be So awesome.

"Puzzle mazes are used in some Thassilonian and Osiriani ruins, but they should be used much more than they are. They let you keep your secrets secure, but still ensure that once you pass all your magical discoveries aren't lost as long as someone clever enough goes looking. Plus, if someone gets through them while you're still alive it's an easy way to meet interesting people. I have a lot of ideas in mind for when I get around to making one."

"That sounds like the coolest thing ever!"

Seelah doesn't think puzzle mazes are cooler than regular normal buildings, let alone being able to ambush demons with your unlimited eighth circle spells, but wizards are going to wizard and it's nice that they're keeping each other company. "Anything else to do before we go back and report? Seems to me you should be able to make this work, if the army's coordinated enough."

"I haven't thought of anything." And if nobody else has either, she'll Gate them all back to near Kenabres.

Nobody else has anything to say, and Nenio is still enthusiastic about the gate despite the three she saw earlier today.

She gets all her senior staff briefed on the plan, checks with Harmattan that the army is recruited and supplied and ready to go and with Irabeth that she's not forgetting anything important, and then is up bright and early to get the ball rolling. She's pretty sure she's going to freak out as soon as there's an actual battle and people under her command get killed executing a plan she came up with, but she can't seem to get the freakout meaningfully done with in advance so she's aiming for "after the fighting is thoroughly over for the day" instead.

Some of the soldiers aren't ready as soon as she is - Mendevian army doctrine says they should be ready to, but the fact of the matter is that lots of them are really green. The hour it takes for the clerics to prepare their spells is enough time to fix that, though, and the army is formed up for optimal spellcasting support; there are clerics standing by to cast bless on the soldiers and bless weapon or greater magic weapon on the arrows of the first groups through the gate, and the fact that the rearguard is (hopefully) safe from combat until the battle is joined in earnest means they can afford to distribute more clerics to the vanguard.

They're really green (and so is she) and also they need human amounts of sleep; she's not going to judge. Instead she's going to put up a Gate as soon as Irabeth gives her the go-ahead, twenty feet wide and opening on the beautiful forest clearing, and pop through it first so she can do later ones from the Elysium end and prevent columns from bumping into each other. She's got one hand in a pocket between Alpina's pages, reading the scroll with the palm and talking too fast about the experience of pre-battle nerves with the back.