"We are being handsomely paid to do so, but of course you are welcome."

Oh right he's Abadaran. Convenient. 

"That is all until tomorrow, then." 

And she waits for the spell to end and tries as hard as she can to - hold onto this - though she's not sure if "trying" is the kind of thing that has any mechanism to help remember it later. But if she can manage to keep it, then it's definitely a reassuring thing she can tell Leareth. 

Mage-commander Ovada is politely not doing any mindreading of the new very important allies they need to avoid offending at all costs, and also he thinks he literally can't read Raad; the man doesn't precisely shield against Thoughtsensing, and Leareth might be able to get through, but there's some kind of resistance that un-Gifted people don't normally have, that the lower-circle clerics have a much weaker version of. 

Anyway, he's standing here listening to Raad having half of a conversation in what he assumes is the Haighlei tongue, Ovada himself doesn't speak it at all but it would be Nayoki's native language. And then Raad writes notes in, presumably, his own language and script. Which Ovada also cannot read. 

Ovada is very patiently waiting to hear how badly he screwed up what advice and recommendations Nayoki may have for the next twelve candlemarks until they get her and Leareth back. 

When the spell ends, Raad, still having Tongues up, reads off his notes in Ovada's native language.

Oh wow that spell is really impressive and useful and also it's a little uncanny. He wonders vaguely how long it lasts. 

"...The Shadow-Lover can do that now?" He glances at Herald Joshel and concludes that he does speak Rethwellani and is not being excluded from this conversation. "I - do we know if the Shadow-Lover could always do that?" 

"....Van let slip that he talked to Mardic and Donni - sorry, Mardic and Donni are two Heralds who died a decade ago - that one time after they both Final Striked in Highjorune? Short conversation, I don't know that he would have noticed if they...weren't all there. I'm not sure how we could possibly know if the Shadow-Lover's always made a habit of making pairs of dead souls talk to each other." 

Every single fact Ovada has ever learned about Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron's life has made him feel worse for the man. "I see. - we do have people in the Haighlei Empire," he adds to Raad. "The difficulty with reaching the other continent is that it's out of Gate-range for...pretty much anyone, really, it's several thousand miles. And I'm not sure the planar routing trick we used for Golarion would work, the researchers said it may be harder for places on the same planet because of...fewer degrees of freedom? Constrained search space?" Ovada is not a math person. 

"Would it help if you had a lot of Lesser Restorations and you cast it on the mage continuously while they were getting the Gate up, so they didn't pass out from backlash?" Not that that's cheap but you could surely buy an absurd number of Lesser Restorations for the going price of a Golarion diamond, so it might still be cheaper overall, if the other continent has the same situation where diamonds are mostly just pretty luxury goods with the occasional use case for mage-artifacts that need to be weirdly durable and for some reason can't just be shielded. 

"Lesser Restoration trades off against Gentle Repose," Raad mentions. "Rushd, the wizard, probably knows Teleport, though it's risky without a look at the place and another continent is likely out of his range."

"Right, so we can't really experiment until we've gotten everyone we're going to with Gentle Repose. ...Is there a version of Virtue that does the thing Lesser Restoration helps with - er, specifically the one Blai calls Endurance - instead of the thing channels help with?"

Joshel has recently had WAY TOO MUCH OPPORTUNITY to be stuck listening to Shavri free-associate about what Golarion magic is doing according to Healing-Sight, and he definitely remembers her musing that Virtue-for-Endurance might delay backlash by a significant margin. 

"There's Bear's Endurance, which gives someone an improvement in that ability for minutes. It's also second circle."

Shrug. "Maybe we can experiment with that once we've done all the L– Gentle Repose castings." He almost mangled it into "Lesser Repose" which would have sounded so silly. Why do all the good spells have to come in limited-number slots! 

...Anyway it seems like that's all for the Speak with Soul and they can let Ovada get back to whatever he was doing before this, and figure out what if anything still needs to happen in Haven before they relocate to the border? 

Absolutely. Do they have perhaps a large slate so they can get everybody's slot numbers written down in one central place and assign them before dawn tomorrow? Should someone be running around with the wand right now?

Oh maybe they still need Ovada since a bunch of his people should get tapped with the wand right now and apparently that requires a Gate.

And they can apparently save some wand taps for– Joshel is going to have to just grit his teeth and go have the awkward conversation where he asks Ovada how many diamonds they are willing to just give?? Valdemar?? as presents or something???, so he can add it to the number that they can scrounge up independently and start figuring out exactly how hard they need to filter their list of possible useful-border-locals to Raise, and in the meantime one of the filters needs to be knowing where their body is and that it's intact enough to count - presumably injuries that a Cure would get are allowed and the problem is, like, entire missing limbs? - and figuring out either how to get all of them to a central location or Gate someone multiple stops with the wand and they need to do that tonight. 

It takes another half-candlemark to have confirmation that Ovada is authorizing giving them six diamonds (Nayoki apparently did not provide an exact number and the poor man looked very overwhelmed about deciding and Joshel found himself abruptly feeling more sympathy than self-consciousness).

Between various wealthy nobles with a fondness for spending their wealth on jewelry, and who owe enough favors to the King or the Heralds or otherwise have enough of a personal stake that they can be reasonably be expected to just hand them over For The Good of The Kingdom which Joshel is fairly sure is very un-Abadaran but also he is so fully aware that they literally cannot afford to pay in gold, they still owe like three mercenary companies the early cancellation penalty and he has no idea how they're going to scrape it together...

...he can get another six. So Valdemar would like twelve wand-taps in reserve for later tonight, please. And now Joshel had better go do a lot of very frantic Mindspeech-relay coordination to figure out who they're tapping before it's tomorrow and too late, and he's pretty sure they will have that list and a plan to get to them in plenty of time but he's still feeling very self-conscious that the highly senior cleric of Abadar is going to be judging him for being so unprepared.

He's abusing Guidance very hard and MAYBE that will EVENTUALLY become his main association with it, the making himself slightly better at things, and not being ordered to sit in a room trying and failing to focus on his actual job while being harassed by math researchers at random intervals averaging every three minutes or so. 

Valdemar in fact has everything lined up for people to be tapped with the wand for later Raising well before it's already tomorrow and therefore too late. 

Shavri does, eventually, leave to get some sleep.

She sleeps badly. She's spending way too much time ruminating on this morning and it feels like there's nowhere to go with it and in any other situation it would be obvious that she needs to talk it over someone but who, exactly, it feels like every single person she can think of is either too distant from the situation to understand the context and why she feels so spectacularly awful about - mostly Blai, not that she feels amazing about how she handled the whole situation - or they're too involved. She can't ask Seldan about it, Van is...not really okay yet...and all of the Healers who were there are just as exhausted as she is and the last thing they need is her stupid feelings. 

...But nobody dies overnight, no one deteriorates faster than expected, the less-nausea effect lasts for a good long time, and most of the patients get some actual food down and then some sleep. (Shavri hears about this because she half-wakes in bed with Randi four times and Mindspeaks Nuvia an entire four times to check that nobody is dying, and Nuvia very patiently tells her each time that everyone is fine.) 

She's back a candlemark before dawn, because she might as well be, she wasn't asleep anyway. She paces unhappily. She resists the urge to wake Blai and apologize, because - it's not even for him, Seldan assured her that he barely remembers it and definitely isn't holding a grudge, it's for her and that's just being selfish and she absolutely cannot be selfish at him, of all people, now of all times. 

Songbird Aziza is an early bird, so she sleeps first while the other guy is up on channel duty and gets up in the wee hours to hang out in the sickroom, working on her embroidery and trying not to chat with her brother loudly enough to bother anyone.

She should probably try to be pleasant and welcoming to all these people who came to another world on extremely short notice to help them, but it feels like sometime in the last ten days Shavri forgot how that…works. What if she broke her talking-to-people ability and now the only way she remembers how to interact with other humans is to sound like an Asmodean seminary instructor gods she regrets having read Blai’s mind so much. Not even because it’s one of the parts she feels - morally conflicted - about, in general, it’s incredibly helpful for assessing confused delirious people and she’s used it that way before, just - it lands differently, the connotation is different when Cheliax used mindreading for loyalty tests. And then there’s the part where it’s - in her head, now, and she doesn’t want it there but she can’t un-know it.

She attempts what has to be the most unconvincing smile in the world at the cleric of - Shelyn, she thinks? yes, that’s recognizably the same bird as Van’s - and then sits down to get a Sight-assessment on Vanyel. He must have had a Remove Disease very recently, he looks fine. Nothing for her to do here. She…should really be able to find something better to do with herself than sulking like a little girl who knows she’s disappointed her parents, but it’s not coming to her.

"Good morning," smiles the Songbird. "You look like you've had a dreadful time of it."

It takes Shavri a moment to realize she‘s being addressed, and by then it’s too late to grab the meaning from the surface, you pretty much have to be ‘listening’ in real time to get the word-meanings without everything else.

She feels - wobbly, or something, but she looks up and makes herself meet the woman’s eyes. She doesn’t try to force a smile again, it’s probably even more ghastly than her face at rest.

:Sorry, if you say that again I can pick it up without just reading your entire mind: which Shavri feels particularly weird about now. For reasons. Even though the contents of this nice cleric’s mind would probably be perfectly pleasant and soothing. :I don’t speak your language, have to cheat. I’m Shavri by the way.:

The downside of Mindspeech is that it’s even harder to hide the overtones of…whatever mood or feeling she is, right now, she doesn’t have a name for it…than it is to keep it off her face.

"I didn't expect you to; I just was pretty sure you were one of the telepaths. I said, you look like you've had a dreadful time of it."

What are you even supposed to say to that.

:...I wouldn't have said I was the one who had the dreadful time here: Shavri says, slowly and sort of blankly. :I - have you ever had a plan and it, it worked, but you still felt like you must have made several different terrible errors of judgement to end up where you did?: 

"I can't say that I have. Do you want to talk about it?"

She seems to have started talking about it half without meaning to so...maybe? Apparently?

:I guess so. If you - if you really don't mind.: A bitter half-chuckle. :I feel slightly insane right now.: And she also doesn't have the slightest idea where or how to start. 

"I don't mind at all. Anyone would be fragile after this much desperate work."

Fragile. That's a good word for it, Shavri thinks. The wobbliness, the...feeling like there's something hollow in the center of her, something she misplaced at some point in the last ten days, something that was necessary for pulling herself back together afterward. 

:It was - yesterday? maybe? no, that's not right, it was two nights ago - that I thought, I didn't want to keep doing this to them - trying to keep them alive in case we somehow got the Gate in time - we didn't think we were going to. Two nights ago they said it'd be four days - we wouldn't have made it four days, you saw - and it just, it wasn't worth it? To keep putting them through all that misery for a tiny chance of a miracle. So I–: She shrugs, helplessly. :I don't normally pray. We - your god seems lovely, a lot of the Golarion gods seem lovely, but ours aren't - Good - I don't know what They are. But the Shadow-Lover's god seemed to be sort of vaguely in some dubious way trying to be helpful, so I - prayed - I said, if You're steering to make it work in time, if You're going to pull out a miracle for us, I need to know, that it's going to be worth it, that I'm not just...torturing people for a one in a hundred chance of saving four diamonds, you know?: 

She has no idea if any of that is making sense, so far. She skipped a lot of the leadup and she has no idea if this woman - if she introduced herself Shavri has completely forgotten her name - has actually gotten read in on the broader situation. It felt impossibly hard to go any further back and fill that in.