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They send her back.
- they send her back, and where she was when she was last in this plane was a classroom doing some kind of interplanar studies spellcasting, and there must be something wrong with time between the planes because they are still - here -
- she falls, again, and lands, again, and, shaking, opens her clenched-shut eyes.
"Hmm. I could - play around with it more, I guess? See if I can invent slightly more efficient ways of doing the spell. Or I could ask Savil to rotate to different things more often."
Vanyel tenses up a bit. "Um, it has as long as I've been a mage. But I guess not actually forever – I went through a Gate with Savil before all the things happened."
"All right." Vanyel squares his shoulders. "I guess it'd be pretty useful for a lot of people if I could Gate places."
"I'm also thinking about whenever you're sent on circuit - I can check in with you, but if an emergency comes up being able to travel suddenly on your own would give you more options."
"Gating is tiring even for people who aren't allergic to it. But - yes, it'd be good to have that option."
Vanyel does think about the Gate question over the next few days – it's probably a good idea but it doesn't seem urgent, there are a lot of other reasons he doesn't feel ready to go on circuit yet including the fact that he still can't reliably fall asleep without Bella's help, and it does seem likely to be stressful and a lot of work.
He does talk to Savil about changing up his routine work (she's surprised he didn't ask sooner), and coaxes himself to be more inventive with it, and spends less time unproductively distracted. It helps that as more time passes without any suspicious potential god schemes against Bella, much less a competently-executed one, the situation is feeling less imminently terrifying.
The ice dream still hasn't happened again since their last earcuff conversation with Leareth.
She makes steady but not breakneck progress on interplanar transit. It has to be possible - that's how she got here - but she won't settle for random, which seems to be what the university students were doing...
And a few weeks later, out of the blue in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon, Savil knocks on her shields.
:Getting a weird Web-alarm. Can't see anything it corresponds to but it's - above the east half of the city? Wondered if you had a minute to go check it out:
:Well, I query the Web for what's going on where, and it tells me '???' and 'about half a mile up in the air'. Think it might be moving, it was east of the outer city walls when I first checked. It's got to be some kind of magic, that's what the Web senses, but I can't think what: The overtones are more confusion than worry. :Could be a false alarm, I guess, but - that's really unusual:
I can fly over if it's not visible from here, yeah. She excuses herself to Gemma and ducks out and goes aloft.
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