Typically, that doesn't include 16 year olds who aren't even adepts, but the usual gate-crafting crew all know her well enough to vouch for her abilities and control. She can make unsupported gates solo now, after all, albeit with great effort, and for concert-work with half a dozen adepts capable of drawing on the local node energy already involved control and visualization is more important than another source of raw power.

They're kind of doubtful, honestly, but since she's not an Adept she's not as expensive to hire, and if they're at the point of doubting the knowledge of the experts they specifically hired for this reason they probably shouldn't be doing this task at all. The project manager asks the representatives of the merchant guild hiring him for confirmation, but he soon gets it and her application is approved.

The work is exhausting, especially since near the beginning she used more mage power than was optimal in order to speed a few parts of her end up and had to be even more careful later on to make up for it. When making normal gates, that's perfectly sensible, but permanent gates it is spectacularly unlikely for it finishing a second later - if it even did, since in this case she ended up having to wait on one of the other mages anyway - will actually end up mattering for anything. She knew that, of course, but her instinctual gate casting skills are drilled in and it's not that easy to just turn them off for the short period they're not needed, not when the resulting magical structure works fine anyway. Amy takes advantage of the next break point - periods during the casting where the resulting structure is mostly stable and only requires a fraction of the mages to keep it pinned in place - to finally catch her breath and get some water. She's not the only one doing so, and one of the other people she recognizes as one of her seniors from Urtho's classes who graduated two years back.

"Is it always so tiring?" she asks, once they're no longer gulping down water.

"Concert work in general? Not usually. But permanant gates, for sure, they're a real doozy. Dunno anyone who finds them easy work, besides maybe Urtho."

"Kirimvir Ma'ar," one of the others offered, to a round of chuckles.

"Hah! No, not even him, although you'd be forgiven for thinking that. He was crazy talented, and incredibly stubborn about showing weakness, so he'd always come out of a casting looking like he could go another few hours, but he got tired as much as the rest of us did."

Not quite a standard Predaini name, a part of her notes, although certainly closer to that than most others. From somewhere in that general area, most likely, or at least with family there. She knows most of her seniors, though, especially those with the kind of talent it takes to be considered noteworthy in Tantara, and she doesn't recognize the name. Combined with the past tense they use to refer to him, it doesn't have good implications.

"Did something happen to him?"

"Nah, not like that. He just up and left one day. Wasn't for lack of opportunity either, we still get clients asking for him now and then. He went up north somewhere."

"Predain?"

"Yeah, that's the one. There's not really much in the way of civilization there, so it's anyone's guess why he did it. Family, maybe, but if he had any he never talked about it; Ma'ar could be a real private guy. Not like he was shy, more like he just didn't feel the need to share."

About then they signal the end of the break, and Amy is once more distracted by visualizing extremely complicated spell structures and, extremely carefully, combining them with the already extant working. By the time the day is over, she hasn't forgotten about Ma'ar - Amy Vondua almost never forgets something she's learned - but the details are no longer salient and her attention that evening is grabbed by her correspondence, which includes a letter from one of the very few other Mage-healers outlining a potential method to remove deeply buried shrapnel via miniature gates. The precision required for useful results is absurd, especially considering the issues of aiming that finely for anyone without healing sight to guide them, and in 90% of all cases surgery is just a better option anyway. The principle is technically sound, however, and she loses herself in penning the minutiae of the various impossibilities and difficulties that would need fixing as well as her own proposed methodology to do so until she retires for the night.

The next event to pull Amy out of her routine comes to her not from her status as a mage, but from her skills as a healer. Apparently the town of Gora has an outbreak of plague, and has asked the king for aid. The king, in turn, prevailed upon the healers' consortium to provide relief, and in light of the benefits of not having a plague ravage Tantara has decided to spend enough to get a prompt and serious response. Urtho's gate network is in almost all regards an enormous positive for both Tantara and the surrounding countries, but it does mean that if they aren't careful at the start of an outbreak with treatment and quarantine it can get out of control extremely quickly. The lesson is one they had to learn the hard way, but fortunately the first such outbreak took place decades ago and the crown and nobles have largelyn learned from their mistakes.

Amy isn't a specialized disease expert, or even the best such available, but she's close with the woman who is, having spent several of the last few years as an on-and-off student whenever their schedules permitted.

Though they both have a hub of learning at Urtho's tower, the healer networks and mage networks aren't that closely tied together. Charis doesn't actually know who she would contact about getting a gate to Gora that same day, but while she's sure she could track someone down via the internal bureaucracy - probably involving asking the Hertasi - she does know someone who would know, so she sends a runner off to ask Amy about it while she organizes an away team consisting of a mixture of healers and mundane nurses, as well as gathering the neccesary medical supplies, clean water, and fuel in case they end up being needed.

Amy doesn't gate over, such being an irresponsible use of magic and also completely unnecessary at the distances in question, but she does hurry and arrives rather quickly.

"Do you know anyone with a gate location near Gora? It's a small town, near the northern border, and it's a good three days travel from the nearest connector to the gate network. There was a report delivered to the palace by message spell this morning of a plague outbreak there, we're looking to get it under control as quickly as feasible."

Briefly, Amy considers just doing it herself. Three days is a fairly sizable distance to travel by foot, but it's not even especially long as gate distances go. You're not supposed to be able to gate to locations you haven't been, but that's an oversimplification; any time you gate from an unknown location to someplace you know, such as one might do if they found themselves lost, you're doing the operation in question in reverse. You need to have a good coordinate map and know how to make unsupported gates, as well as be willing to aim a little bit into the air so the other end isn't inside of something, but it can be done and Amy is even good enough to do it.

Unfortunately for her plans, doing it this way is notably more tiring than the normal version, and she'll need her energy if she wants to be treating patients. It's more sensible - if, perhaps, potentially a bit less impressive for her teacher - for her to go and arrange transportation for at least the trip there.

"Not off the top of my head, but I know who to ask."

And then she fires off a communication spell to the Hertasi in question, who has the rather unenviable role of organizing the different accounting by mages of where they're familiar with enough to gate to, and has it cross referenced with those currently in or nearby the tower before getting a hit and a pair of backup candidates to ask.

It'll take them a few minutes to get back to her, but this is indeed something important and they don't mind the task! The job is less difficult than you would imagine from the outside, anyway; they have an internal system that lets them sort through the requisite information relatively easily. (Somehow, more in depth explanations on the methodology therein have only ever managed to create more horror at the difficulty of the task rather than provide the desired reassurance. They aren't too sure why, it makes sense to them.)

Presently they will relay to Amy a list of three candidates with the required skill and nearby gate locations currently in Ka'venusho. One of them has registered with the communications desk that they are not to be contacted outside of emergencies, which in this case means only if the other two fall through, but the best candidate is apparently available as a message spell target so that shouldn't be an issue.

Armed with their identifying information, Amy can ask them if they are available to help out with the required gates.

They are! And at the usual discounted prices for requests coming from within the mage's network; graduates of Urtho's tower are perhaps not disdainful of outsiders, but they certainly have a culture of internal trust and friendliness that fails to universalize. There are limits to how far it will go, but if a well liked and connected alumnus wanted to, say, hire a whole troop of mages for assistance in creating an entirely new extension of the permanant gate network and accompanying nodes, it could be obtained for a reasonable price rather than purchasable for neither love nor money. The mission's transportation budget will more than cover it even if Amy ends up taking corresponding compensation for her own work on the matter.

She probably won't; she usually doesn't, and this after her mother had to persuade her to accept payment for any healing she does.

Then either Charis will have money left over afterwards, or as more often happens the slush spent to compensate overtime that the healers in question really ought to refrain from without commensurate compensation but almost inevitably will end up doing regardless. Tantaran healers are perhaps a bit more sensitive about their own usefulness when compared to the value of its mage supply, and despite efforts on both sides occasionally manifests as something of an inferiority complex that motivates them to try and show up their counterparts.

It takes a few more hours for them to arrange the needed supplies and clear the schedules for the responding healers, but by late afternoon they are departing through the gate terminal to Pelanga.

And from there, their transportation can open a gate to Trakai, a small village near Gora they once happened to stop by while looking for potential scholarship students a few years back. Normally he would stick with them until the time came for them to return, but with Amy there to cover the return transportation and a mindspeaker among the healers to call for help should something happen to her, there really isn't a need.

In that case, Amy can send a gate-search spell down the road. This is not a terribly efficient way to do it, especially for distances you can walk, but it's doable over those short distances and it is still cheaper than opening a series of gates at sight distance and more a bit more reliable than using dead reckoning off a mediocre map.

Nothing interferes with her work, so a minute later she hangs the gate - unscaffolded, because the best way to get better is by practicing - and they're in Gora.

There's a young woman standing right next to the gate opening.

A mage, most likely, although that particular realization is made significantly easier by the fact that the Palace was contacted via communication spell in the first place. Not one trained at Urtho's tower, though; the method of contact was some evidence against it, but there are definitely trained mages Amy knows who wouldn't have known who to contact about something like this. What makes it obvious, though, is her age and appearance; while Amy doesn't know all the current crop of students, there's no way she wouldn't have noted it in passing, and Amy doesn't forget anything fully. She might fail to recall it unprompted, perhaps, but not now that they're meeting in person. Her having graduated before Amy is even more impossible unless she's an incredible savant at anti-aging spells, since her own ascent was fast enough to be remarked upon and someone even younger having been through similar classes in the last decade would have resulted in many comparisons.

This isn't suspicious, in the way that it might be several centuries down the line; Tantara has been at peace with all of its neighbors for decades, a peace which was significantly supported by the fact that their mages tend to be just better. A foreign mage inside their borders is surprising, perhaps, but not very threatening or alarming.

"Hello! Are you the one who sent the message?"

"Yes, I am. Fortunately, the outbreak is still in the early stages, but it's going to get much worse without intervention and my own healing abilities are largely limited to the mundane. I suspect the vector is animal, but it's only been a day and I'm not sure which yet. Not dogs, though."

Her spoken Tantaran is pretty good, but the enunciation is noticably careful and there's still a hint of an accent poking through. It adds credence to the foreign hypothesis.

Amy looks around. The town looks... mostly normal, actually. There is any attempt at limiting interactions, but not the kind you would typically get as a reaction to a rash of people bedridden - more along the lines of people being warned, but not taking it especially seriously at an emotional level.

"What makes you so certain of your diagnosis? I'd ask if something had been happening to the livestock, but if it was that would make the job of isolating the transmission vector a lot easier."

"I have some measure of long range foresight; not enough to chart a path to a solution, but I can glimpse the possibilities of inaction. In this case, they're overdetermined enough that it's easy," she says, somewhat rueful. "Finding the starting location was harder, but my god gives... nudges, on occasion, and following what I saw in the fire lead me to here."

Amy will, somewhat belatedly, put together where she's seen that symbol before; it's one of the regional icons for the god of nameless flame.

"Your foresight used fire as a medium? I've never heard of that manifestation before."

"I have a fairly strong gift for firestarting, and my god seems to find it somewhat easier to work with - or at least, preferable."

"That's fascinating! How does that-"

"No, I'm sorry, plague first. What have your visions already told you, and what have you observed since arriving?"

"I know it has the potential to get very bad. It starts out asymptomatic to mild, though I'm not sure for how long, then it hits all at once. Definitely fever, chills, and delirium of some sort, but I'm afraid I don't know much beyond that besides that it can spread from person to person. Mostly I'm just hoping it's not airborne."

Not great is the least she can say about it; that's practically the worst case scenario. Deadly diseases are always bad news, but the ones that do them the courtesy of being obvious at least are relatively easy for people to notice on their own and try to avoid spreading.

"That means we need to find the patient zero, and figure out where they caught it. Fill me in on what you've done so far?"

"Right, priorities. I've taken a bit of a hasty census, just to get an idea of what we're working with here - there's not more than a hundred fifty people all told unless you count some of the really outlying farmsteads, but people meet with their neighbors regularly to talk and exchange gossip, not to mention the fact that there's a weekly festival that gets pretty regular attendance. Getting an effective quarantine here is going to be tough even if we can convince people to try. I've also tried to get people prepared to be out sick - time critical projects finished, any ongoing work ready to be set on pause, easy access to food for when they're laid out with a fever, that kind of thing - but that only so feasible for farmers this time of year."