Tanya tries to apply force to the disk with the flight spell. Can she make it accelerate a bit? Not at ten gees, just a little?

...the spell doesn't think there's anything there. It's behaving as if there's no mass resisting the force being applied, rather than (for example) a mass that is too large.

"I can't move it. It's behaving like an impermeable magical shield, not like a physical object." Hmm. Belmarniss said she could make it follow her but only horizontally, and couldn't move it while she was on it... "Its main limitation is that you can't make it move up, correct? If I fly you up - or around - can you make it follow us? That would make it much more useful for carrying things around if we encounter vertical obstacles in the tunnels, or possibly even as a shield from things on the ground."

"Rynaeri can do that, but I couldn't make it follow me up a ladder when I tried."

"Pity. Maybe she can teach you? It would be very useful for transporting equipment if it could surmount slight vertical obstacles. Although, you're planning to buy a magical bag for our journey. In that case you should find some kind of platform you can stand or sit on that we can take with us so I can fly you over obstacles or through vertical shafts. It needs to be strong and rigid, so I can apply force without risking breaking it, light and compact enough to carry, and ideally with something for you to hold on to."

"She tried, and I worked on it for a while, but I did not seem to be making progress. How big does it need to be? Like, would a dinner plate work?"

"Technically, yes, it would, but you need not to fall of it when I move it sideways and not just up or down. And a dinner plate would probably be too fragile; it should be something strong enough for you to jump or stomp on."

"I might need to get something like that made custom, I'm not thinking of anything commonly available that's right for the job."

If she can make a ceramic mold then Tanya can melt metal and make a platform out of scraps... Really, Tanya is just excited at the whiff of non-military applications for her skills. The reasonable thing to do is of course to leave it to the professional smith.

"Alright. What next?"

"Well, if you have any more suggestions for what it should be shaped like that'll be convenient for putting in an order."

Hmm. "What are the material options? You said wood is expensive; that leaves metal, or I suppose stone but stone would probably be too heavy to carry with us. A metal disk for you to sit on - no, that's too heavy, a strong metal hoop with fabric that can hold your weight. You can tie ropes to its sides to hold on to. Its weight together with you and other cargo should be below a hundred kilograms, ideally below eighty - I'm assuming everything you carry can fit in the magical bag, which would then fit on your lap. I will need to apply upwards force at several points around the hoop to balance it so it doesn't fall over, and you will need to hold still to avoid disturbing that balance; I can also support you with my arms to help with that. Because of balance issues, I don't expect it to be safe to use in combat conditions; in an emergency I can carry you myself but only for a few minutes and it would likely leave both of us bruised."

When aerial mages need to evacuate a wounded or unconscious comrade, they take him in a fireman's carry and switch out every few minutes. This places the weight on the mage's body; the compensating thrust is applied to the mage carrying the body, not to the body itself. This is almost as stressful as a regular fireman's carry, which means Tanya can barely do it for someone of Belmarniss's build. A collapsible stretcher isn't very practical to carry along on routine missions. ...would a stretcher for Belmarniss to lie on be a better solution? It would be easier to balance and harder to fall off of, but making it sufficiently rigid when assembled might be difficult - wait.

"I just thought of another approach. Sling a hammock from a single lengthwise metal pole." She throws up an illusion. "This could have two advantages. First, it's easy to secure you in the hammock so you can't fall out of it, with ropes if necessary. Second, I only need to balance the pole between its two ends, and you can't move the center of gravity as much by shifting; if you swing the hammock, it will pull the pole to that side but it won't change the pole's angle and so won't risk spilling you. Does that make sense? We'd need to carry a fairly long pole, would it fit in the bag?"

"Yeah, a long pole can go in the bag, and shouldn't be too hard to come by either, and I can just take my existing hammock from home."

"Then we can test that solution that before placing a custom order."

"Cool, that can be the next stop."

Belmarniss obtains a long metal pole without too much ado, and apparently has decided that it does not endanger her family to let Tanya know where they live, since she escorts her to the cave in question to take her hammock off the ceiling. (Rynaeri and Sovi are both out, but one of the halflings is in, pickling some mushrooms.)

Tanya certainly wouldn't want to maneuver like this, or even accelerate beyond a gentle one-half gee, but she can in fact hold up the pole and hammock up with her flight spell and move it around! The pole's two ends need to be close to her, so she ends up carrying Belmarniss in front of her. She can even pretend she's doing this by holding her in her arms, if that's an appearance they want to give for some reason.

"It's not particularly, no."

That's one problem resolved. "What else do you need from me to prepare?"

"Are there other things you can do that you haven't mentioned? It'll inform what I buy."

Tanya considers how much to tell her. It's not that she particularly distrusts Belmarniss, but information inevitably leaks and if someone ever wants to seriously attack her she should have some cards in reserve. Most of her abilities are only impressive in aerial combat anyway; she doesn't need to fly very fast or be very fast or track a complex three-dimensional battlefield or level buildings in here, and the available range varies from 'point blank' to 'closer than that'.

"I have a fallback method for fighting in melee which uses magic to cut things very close to my body. I don't intend to use it, because I don't know what the local 'monsters' can do that my shield wouldn't stop or that I might not be able to reflect with a mirror like the burning effect." Why, no, Tanya is totally not the kind of person who'd deliberately fly into melee with enemy mages! Perish the thought.

"I also technically have a healing spell, but it's not great and I'm also not very proficient at using it. It'll help a wound heal more quickly if we have an hour of downtime, but it's not anywhere close to life-saving and it won't replace bandages and sutures and splints."

"I'm not planning to buy bandages and sutures and splints, I was planning to spring for a couple healing potions. I guess I can go for the cheapest weak ones and then any comabt we live through you can... what exactly is it you do?"

"The spell accelerates most of the ways in which the body heals naturally. A wound will close much faster but only it was going to heal well to begin with given time and rest, if there's a broken bone you still have to set it first and if there's serious bleeding you have to bandage it. Well, closing faster also means less chance of getting infected. My version is a primitive one, though, I'd never use it in normal battlefield conditions instead of helping get the wounded to a proper hospital, I only have it because my orb model is a bit of a kitchen sink. And I haven't trained as a medic, so I don't even know how to use it optimally." Specialization and delegation are great until you find yourself unexpectedly without any subordinates. "What do 'healing potions' treat?"

"Injuries, they're no good on infections."

"My spell doesn't directly remove infections but it lets the body clear them faster, if it was going to do that. And if it's a disease then it helps the body fight it off faster than the disease can grow. In theory, anyway, I have a very weak version compared to the state of art and we shouldn't rely on it for anything important, even if it happens to be the cheapest solution for minor injuries we don't want to spend other resources on. I do think we should take nonmagical first aid supplies, unless they're surprisingly expensive here." Tanya has a field dressing kit but it's not a big one.

"I can get... scrap fabric and a sewing kit? I'll clear most infections eventually, and if your spell lets me do more of it under buffs to Endurance and suchlike I'll do better at it, I can cast such things on you too if it comes up though I don't know if you're any tougher than a random person."

"I'm not sure how you measure such things." Tanya is a 14 year old petite girl and has the Strength and Constitution to match, and this is very annoying for a professional soldier but she is too professional to ever let it show. At least she can carry her kit properly now; when she was starting out (...when the war was just starting out) she had to fly a combat mission without her rifle because its weight and recoil were just too much for a nine-year-old body. Luckily, computation orb technology has advanced greatly since those days, so she can at least be a properly equipped child soldier.

"Are bandages expensive? The wound dressing is more important than the fabric holding it in place, you can probably hold it in place with string or something, but the bandage and other tools need to be in sterile packaging - you probably don't have that - or sterilized with antiseptics before use. Boiling water isn't great but it's much better than nothing, since you can cool it back down quickly, the wound itself might also need to be washed. ...unless you're wounded. I have scissors, tweezers and a scalpel in my kit but not much suturing thread and the suturing needles are joined to the thread and not really meant to be reusable. "

Belmarniss was planning to treat wounds with a sewing kit? Aren't local children taught basic wilderness camping? She is very lucky Tanya showed up.

"Well, I could swat you with Admonishing Rays which do nonlethal damage you'd be able to just sleep off, but those hit pretty variably, we'd have to do it a few times to get a solid sense of whether you can take more or fewer of 'em than me on average and it wouldn't tickle. I am not actually aware of anyone selling bandages, they might be out in the suburbs catering to people who can't afford magical healing even if they get really banged up? I do not know what you mean by sterilizing things but if you mean cleaning them I have Prestidigitation."

"I don't doubt that if I take down my magical shield and barrier and don't try to defend myself, a weak but well-placed physical blow can take me out, but that's not what's actually relevant in combat. If you want to try battering down my shield to estimate its strength against physical impacts, we can do that and I can also tell you how much energy it loses from each impact."

"Mundane and magical healing are complements on my world; people who can afford magical healing use it on top of ordinary emergency care, not instead of it. If yours replaces emergency treatment entirely it might be better than what we have."