Seems reasonable.

He makes an effort to stand up. I'm going to need to walk for the coronation. Hard to practice in front of people, though. 

Anything I can do to help?

Prevent me from collapsing on the floor, if I seem headed that direction?

That seems manageable. Will do.

He does not collapse on the floor. He walks agonizingly slowly and stiffly.

It's a little painful to watch, but at the same time this represents an obvious improvement over lying on a grav stretcher barely able to sit up. Miles has mixed feelings. (He has spent a fair amount of time lying in hospital beds barely able to sit up, himself, and it is one of his least favourite states of being.)

He stops after a few minutes. Thanks for the supervision. I do not really want to call people in to find me on the floor.

Anytime, says Miles.

How are you doing?

I have all these opportunities to successfully and substantially help people. It's great.

I am overjoyed to hear it. The engineers have taken your work and run with it; if the coronation goes off smoothly then I think all we shall need is our army.

The army's shaping up nicely. I'm pleased with our progress.

Are we going to need to invent a lot of weaponry to level at Angband, or do you think it can be done with these numbers and your current weapon capabilities?

What I want to invent before launching my next assault on Angband is vehicles, actually. I want everyone in the air so he can't drop another mountain on us.

Ooooh. How hard to pull off is that going to be?

We'll need grav tech, but I want grav tech anyway because the imploder lance has been my most effective weapon so far. When we get to the point where I think we have a chance at usefully reverse-engineering it, I'll take apart one of the spare grav stretchers with the engineers and go from there. At the rate we're going, I'd say we'll reach that point in half a year to a year, and we'll probably have plasma arcs in production by that point but maybe not stunners or nerve disruptors. Is that fast enough, or should I be taking more time out of training the army to accelerate the engineers?

I don't have a good sense of what the tradeoff between your time the two ways is, but that's fast enough. We were expecting the war to take three hundred - though we got more than three hundred years' tech boost...

Yes you did, he says, smugly. ('I'm giving them away as fast as I can'...)

I'm definitely putting most of my time into the army right now; I could put a little more into engineering and the engineers would gain more than the army lost, but I'd be soaking up the difference by courting one of my week- or month-long low-energy moods, and I'm really hoping to avoid having those at least until the first batch of trainees graduates and the engineers start in on grav tech. Or I could slow the army down noticeably to speed up the engineers without pushing myself quite so hard, but I'm not sure that's worthwhile or it would've been the balance I struck initially.

Do keep up your energy, we're rather counting on it. Do you know what typically spurs those? Overwork? Are there things we can do to take some off your shoulders?

Doing too much, doing too little - you may have picked up on how I had to go do linguistics for hours after my storytelling sessions? I need to stay intellectually engaged, especially if I'm doing something emotionally difficult. I suspect the moods would come around eventually even if I didn't give them an excuse, but in fact they usually hit right after a mission when I run out of immediate responsibilities to keep busy with. On the other hand it's also possible for me to overwork myself - I did it at Tau Verde and got that bleeding ulcer and had to have my stomach replaced; I haven't done it again that badly since, but I think that's because I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of taking care of myself, not because bleeding ulcers were the only thing that can possibly go wrong if I don't. Anyway. I don't know if I can go the rest of my life without another crash, but I think I can manage a year if I fill my time with interesting work, of which there is no shortage, and if I eat and sleep regularly and don't try to do more than I'm able and nothing unexpectedly emotionally devastating happens. And if one morning I don't come out of my shuttle because I'm in a mood, give me a week or so to rebalance myself and then, well, Ivan once dumped a bucket of water over my head and that worked pretty well, I'm sure you'll be able to figure something out.

I expect I can, yes. Don't push yourself too hard regardless.

I'm hoping to make it the full year.

I will keep it in mind as a thing to work around. This might even with your aid be a long war and it's not worth burning out to get ahead in the moment.

Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. Although as much as possible I've been trying to - make myself less crucial to the whole thing. Hopefully in a year I'll be able to take a week off for a mood without slowing things down much.