It will let him swallow ten minutes' worth of apple juice. No promises on keeping it. "Remove Sickness."

And Vanyel can cast his own short one on Blai, and do his last channel a couple of candlemarks later, and then it’s just another long winter night ahead.

Shavri saves the second Remove Disease as long as she can. They’ll have two more soon, but she doesn’t want to end up with them sliding earlier and earlier until they’re both needed right away with 23 candlemarks to go until the next ones are available. Well. They will end up there, eventually, but she wants it to be as late as possible. 

Play the cards right…

VANYEL HOW DO YOU HAVE PNEUMONIA

WHERE DID YOU EVEN FIND THAT

She wakes Blai to cast a Remove Disease on Vanyel about a candlemark before dawn.

…Does Shavri think Blai has a fever, he feels warm. (Seldan was kind of enjoying it until he thought through what it meant.)

Peek.

:…Mm. A bit. I should figure out where that’s coming from.: Shavri’s mindvoice is almost philosophical. :He can probably still take enough Healing to us to deal with it the usual way.:

:Did you sleep?: Seldan asks her abruptly. His time sense is getting hazy but it’s night and he doesn’t remember any long block of not seeing her.

:Five candlemark. I’ll nap some more in the afternoon.: Shavri doesn’t really want to be out of the room for a whole eight candlemarks at a time anymore.

Blai casts where he is directed to cast. He assumes everyone already knows the... some important... triage thing about how if he has a fever then... something. Hand goes like this words go like that.

It’s okay. Shavri has this, but also Seldan is right here and he’s following her reasoning. She’s going to try to keep everyone stable as long as possible so they’re starting out using the Remove Disease slots as late in the day as possible and Blai isn’t desperately ill yet so he’s going to be stuck having a fever for a while but it’s okay, it’s a good thing, it means still having the spells when they need them most. 

They should get some more sleep before dawn.

(Shavri spends the hour murdering the heck out of everything she can find that could possibly be making Blai feverish. She thinks it was something in one of the deep abdominal organs, maybe, but she’s not actually sure. She’ll see if he seems any better at dawn.)

blrg

Fortunately the spell list is very straightforward even if Iomedae won’t actually accept “exactly what I asked for yesterday”. Blai has been doing this for decades, well, not with Iomedae specifically, but he’s not going to forget how. And Seldan is right here, they’re in this together. 

Shavri hates everything right now and she really, really hopes she judged right, that Blai didn’t actually look that bad physically - relatively speaking, her standards here are low - and that means he can stay awake the whole candlemark to pray.

(Vanyel was really very badly off by the time she made the call. He doesn’t have as much lung reserve as most people, he’s had a bad pneumonia before, and it’s been three days since his last Lesser Restoration aimed at Strength. Dexterity won’t help him cough or manage to breathe when it’s taking three times as much effort as usual to get enough air.)

Blai manages to prepare his spells (this time he's down to running on "I was told to prepare these spells" and can only inconsistently summon anything about the rationale, but "I was told to prepare these spells" he can do on three days of sleepless dry fast). He can cast them, too.

Vanyel can also prepare spells! He’s not even feeling that terrible right now! It won’t last, and Stef is worse off than him again so the lifebond is pulling energy in that direction again. But he can prepare spells and he even feels kind of up for sipping broth without Remove Sickness.  

They'll want most of Blai's spells right away. Lesser Restoration, up front, one on everyone, for Endurance. That should perk Blai up a little bit, especially to the extent that his problem isn't just having diseases but being drained from all the Healing she did trying to slow down said diseases. 

(Shavri loves Remove Disease, it's such a good spell, it just...resets people...it's admittedly probably a lot more effective on people who are attempting to get infections in eight places at once at all times. Why does it have to be third circle, it's not fair.) 

...No one seems to be getting the full benefit of a Lesser Restoration today, except Seldan at the end. They mostly do seem to have been getting very lucky on the spell landing well - thank you, Someone, if that was You, she thinks vaguely - and after the third one she thinks that hasn't changed. It's - they've passed some threshold, some step-change, and a full 24 candlemarks between Lesser Restorations is too long, and by the next one some of the accumulating damage is already...stuck, or whatever the phenomenon is, whatever makes it inaccessible to a second-circle spell. 

Well. That puts a very hard cap on how many days they have left even if she handles all the fucking infections perfectly. Not very many days. Stef, as always, is probably the limiting factor, he has shit endurance. Seldan...will at this rate outlast everyone by several days, except that of course he won't outlast Blai at all so there's not actually any point in taking advantage of the spell continuing to work okay for him. So she'll double Van tomorrow, give him Strength as well, so that next time he won't be tiring out after only a couple of candlemarks of difficulty breathing even with the fucking air-of-life talisman, she's really glad they have those. 

She's so tired. Which means she should sleep while she can, even if she suspects most of the feeling isn't about sleep at all. 

She gets Blai to give Stef a Remove Sickness and then...lets him go back to sleep. He's not desperately dehydrated, he can sleep for a while, he just needs to be capable of casting one spell on himself whenever she decides to call it, which is honestly more likely to be timed on Stef's deterioration than Blai's. 

She can stretch it to...early afternoon. She doesn't love it but it's what she has to work with. 

:Blai. Wake up. Remove Disease, on yourself.: 

yessir. up. remove disease on self. is he sick that would explain a lot.

...right, he remembers now.

Calibration for future Shavris: ...Blai could totally have pulled off casting a spell, like, six candlemarks later than this and maybe as late as right before dawn. Preparing spells, she has no idea and wouldn't like to risk it, but she's going to feel more wiggle room tomorrow. Sorry, Blai

:It's a couple of candlemarks after noon. Second day that they've been doing - measurements or something all over all the elemental planes, with the research team. Seems like they're getting better at it, Brightstar's only been in for one channel so far. They think they could have something in four or five days, if - obviously it's not guaranteed - but if everything goes right and they get lucky.: 

Shavri is not loving their chances of lasting four to five days. In fact, at this point she flat-out expects they won't. But Blai deserves to know. 

:Stef needs a Remove Disease too, and then you can have your Remove Sickness. I let you sleep through the morning so you should try to catch up a bit on fluids.: 

Seldan SAW that expression on Shavri's face and he is pretty sure he knows exactly what it means but, like, she's probably not wrong? Blai has extremely useful reflexes here even if they're quite likely a direct result of the horrible thought experiment country and the horrible thought experiment evil seminary and all that. 

It's nice to have his more coherent Blai back. Seldan himself still doesn't seem to have any diseases, it must be the Groveborn toughness thing. 

He thinks he could at least hold the mental board together for some chess solitaire, if Blai feels up for it while the Remove Sickness is in effect. 

Blai does his castings. Then he can... stare at... the mental chess solitaire board, and at least when his few and far between thoughts come, they are stupid chess moves instead of stupid anxieties.

That seems nicer! Seldan will hold onto it as long as he can and possibly a little longer than he should have, he has a headache. 

Stef should get a second Remove Sickness - the one Seldan isn't getting - and then Shavri's going to head off to sleep, after assigning two Healers to the task of preventing Vanyel from getting fucking pneumonia again. They should call her back if anyone's crashing before dawn, but it's. Not going to get easier after this point. And probably tonight is the best night to grab some real uninterrupted sleep. There aren't any decisions left to make, just the channels on schedule. If they need a Stabilize they should wake Blai for it, Van's gone longer since he had a Remove Sickness. They should not hesitate to do that if they think it even might help but also they should really have woken Shavri up HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THAT but– 

okay she's going now. 

Brightstar staggers in on Jisa's arm to catch the late-evening channel, Vanyel's last one of the day. He's not covered in third-degree burns, this time, it's more the all-day accumulation of less serious burns and being thrown into the wall of the Work Room. 

Brightstar is too tired for facial expressions but Jisa looks jubilant. :We got really good measurements: she tells everyone. :Leareth's mages are going to do a lot of math now and make graphs of it for a few days and then we'll use that to figure out a Gate routing.: 

Oh, it sounds like they're really actually going to be able to do this. Seldan hadn't been sure. Young people can be really overconfident about hard theoretical problems like that. 

...Several days of math and then they start figuring out a Gate-routing, and it won't be a simple one or it'd have been done before.