Weekly Digest 75- (#230 - #232) (Patreon)

Basic Bricklaying

"Stacks?" Lori said skeptically.

"I'll explain over lunch," Rian said. "Since, you know, I came out here to tell you it was lunch time and all?"

Lori grunted, taking one last look at her unfinished wall. The segment she was working on has basically just a pile of softened stone that she'd plopped down and was looked like melted candle wax. It annoyed her just to look at it. "Fine. Come on."

She shouldered her stone shaping tool, trudging back towards the Dungeon.

"So," she said once she was seated at her table. "Explain yourself."

"You need to start building the wall from the bottom up," Rian said as Umu shuffled closer to him, ignoring their conversation wrap her arms around his.

"Rian, I know all about how you need a secure foundation to build on," Lori said. "I might not remember who any of them were, but I remember the meeting with the masons and engineers."

"You're going to make them cry, you know that?" Rian said, sighing as he said it. "But no, not that. You're forgetting your basic wall building, your Bindership. Which is regrettable, because back when you were making ordinary walls for houses, you did it right without having to be told how."

"Rian…" Lori growled.

"Your Bindership, instead of building the wall by trying to grow it sideways, you need to grow it from the bottom upwards," Rian said. He said it simply, like it was something blatantly obvious. "Before, when you've made a walls, you didn't try to raise up a pillar, then added material to the side of the pillar and grow it sideways." He mimed holding up his arm, and then pulling at something imaginary from it with his other hand, moving carefully so as not to dislodge the weaver holding it. "You put stone down on the ground and pulled it upwards to make walls."

"This wall can't be shaped like that, Rian," Lori said. "It will be under different stresses, horizontal instead of vertical"

"So? It's still a wall. You build it the same way. From the bottom upwards. Look, from what I could see, you're trying to shape the wall so that's it wider at that base so that it can withstand the water pressure, right?"

"Obviously."

"And I just bet that what's slowing you down is you're trying to build it so that it has perfectly sloped sides, right?"

"Rian, is this going somewhere relevant?"

Rian sighed, an annoyingly fond expression on his face. "Perfectionists," he said, sounding exasperated. "Your Bindership, if you want this thing build quickly, forget about the having perfectly sloped sides and focus on having the wide base. I know in your head you see the wall as having sloped sides, but on a practically level it doesn't need them. What matters is the base is wide and gradually narrows as the wall gets higher."

"Which is why it has sloped sides," Lori explained patiently. Rian wasn't usually this idiotic.

Rian had the gall to put on a patient expression that had Lori gritting her teeth at the very sight of it, anger starting to smolder inside her, hands clenching into fists as— "I'll be right back," Rian said, extricating himself from Umu—who pouted—and leaving.

Lori glared at him as he left, breathing in deeply and gathering magic to calm herself. No, no, don't be angry just because he made that face. That annoying, condescending, 'I'm doing you a favor by explaining this nonsense to you, why are you so stupid that you don't understand this' face.

When Rian came back, he still had on that ace, but he was also carrying an armful of the wooden cups everyone drank from. He put them down on the table. Why did he have so"All right," Rian said. He took three of the cups and arranged them in a line. Then her placed cups on top of those cups. "Here we have a wall, a good presentation of, say, the walls of the houses you've built." He made a show of pressing down on them. "As you can see, they're very good at bearing vertical forces, but not horizontal ones." At this he poked sideways at one of the cups at the bottom, pushing it far enough that it tumbled over and the cup on top of it fell off.

"Get to the point, Rian," Lori said through gritted teeth. The only reason she hadn't kicked him yet was because he was standing behind his bench.

"However, the wall you're trying to make is wide at the base, to be able to better bear those horizontal forces," Rian said. "Like this." He placed three cups in a line like a wall. Than he placed two cups on top of those, over the point where the bottom cups touched their neighbor. Finally, he placed a single cup at the very top. "This is the outline of the wall you're trying to build, right?"

Well, it was exaggerated, but… "Essentially," Lori said, annoyed.

Rian nodded. "This is how you build the flood wall faster. You build it like this."

"I'm already building it like that!"

"No," Rian said. "You're building it like this." He put down to cups next to each other in a line towards her, then put a cup on top of where they met. Then he put down to cups next to the previous two, and put a cup on top of those. He did this three more times, and Lori found herself staring bemusedly at a five-cup wide wall.

Rian pushed that wall aside. "You need to build it like this." He put down five pairs of cups in a line five cups wide. Then he put a cup on top of each pair. The same wall of cups as before faced her.

Lori stared at the wall of wooden cups.

"It's basic brick laying," Rian said with a sigh. "Basic stacking, really. Have a wide base, than have the next layer on top be slightly less wide, and so one and so forth until you reach the top. So start building the base first. Please tell me you understand it now?"

…

Argh! So simple! So obvious! How could she have missed it!

Well, she knew the answer to that. She'd been concerned about making sure the cross-section of the wall was the right shape she hadn't really thought of the most efficient way to build the wall that way! Instead, she'd been trying to personally hand-shape everything! Working harder instead of smarter like an idiot!

"Ah, I take it by that emphatic fist slam onto the table that you do," Rian said as the wall of cups came tumbling down. He and Umu frantically tried to keep them cups from rolling off the table. "So, does this help?"

"Yes," Lori ground out.

Rian nodded, looking relieved. "If you really want the walls looking neat with smooth slopes, I know some people who are excellent masons with the tools right to shape mortar and plaster into exactly those kinds of smooth slopes. You know, so you can get done faster?"

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Rian's idea for how she could build the flood wall faster was annoying in its simplicity. It was the sort of simple idea that in hindsight should have been obvious, but for some reason hadn't been. Not until Rian had told her. After he had…

Well. She put it into practice after lunch.

Stacks, Rian had said.

Lori stared down at the… well. It was rock she'd taken from the stockpile, extending in a line over the stone foundation. It hadn't been shaped, simply… moved and dumped there, running parallel to the river. At its highest point, the long, extrusion-looking pile of stone rose up to a quarter of the way up her thigh, and Lori was not a short woman.

It had taken… well, about an hour or so to get all the stone from the stockpile and in place, and most of that was from being careful while she was moving the stone. The whole time, she had to resist the urge to make everything neat and flat and level and consistently shaped. A part of her, the same part that almost physically hurt when she had to listen to amateurish dragon shelter party music, was feeling something of the usual pain, but she pressed it down. It was just for now, she told herself. It was just for now…

The low, mound-like wall of stone extended in a line all the way until the point the stone foundation turned inwards and stopped paralleling the river, and was not quite a pace and a half wide at its widest point, its surface uneven. By its very nature, the stone was imperfect and riddled with structural flaws in the form of folds of trapped air and water, since she'd just basically moved stone there and dumped it into place. However, it was far, far greater in overall volume than that pitiful length of wall she'd been working on for the past days and a half. If one were using that as a benchmark, then she had, technically, already greatly increased her rate of construction.

Lori then spent the next two hours or so fixing all the mistakes. Removing the bubbles of air trapped in the stone that weakened the structure, making sure the stone lay flat on the ground so that it distributed its weight evenly, and fusing it to the stone foundation that fused to the bedrock.

Then, once that was done, she got more stone and did it again, using Whispering to pile—or according to Rian, stack—the softened stone atop the first mound wall. This was a bit harder, since she needed to push the stone upwards, even if she could fuse the stone to the mound and shift and shape the stone to rise. She had to do it carefully, less the angle and the weight of the stone cause something to crack, leading to the whole thing falling over. Still, she managed it, having the stone roll up slowly from one end of the forming wall to the other.

Once the second layer of stone was in place, she had to fix mistakes all over again. Try as she might, air somehow still got trapped as stone flowed up and over, and she had to go back and forth along the wall twice to be able to get rid of the air and water pockets. There was no further attempts to make it smooth or clean it up to appease the part of her that cringed on looking at it. Just get rid of the weak points between the two layers of stone she'd just basically dragged into place and threw over each other.

By the end of the day, however, she had a long, wide wall that rose just above her stomach to just under her sternum in spots—try as she might, she couldn't get the heights evened out without spending time hard-shaping the stone—that was mostly free of structural defects. Simply from volume of the stone in the wall alone, she estimated that she'd finished building somewhere between a quarter and a third of the overall flood barrier.

True, it was ugly, uneven, and looked like giant lines of beast excrement that had been extruded across the ground, but it was technically a wall, technically made of solid stone, and technically the right, wide-bottomed shape for resisting the pressures of flooding. And… she could just fix it later, right? Make the slopes smooth and even…

"This is going to be a permanent fixture of my demesne, isn't it?" Lori muttered disgustedly. A temporary measure that became permanent…

Lori was frantically using her stone-shaping too to try and flatten out the slopes of the sides when Rian came to call her for dinner.

"Nice! It's coming up faster now," Rian said cheerfully, so he was probably smiling widely under that towel. "At this rate, you'll be done in four or five days!"

"Yes, yes, it worked," Lori irritably She sighed, knowing she'd have to go back inside soon. There was no way she was going to work out here at night, even if she could simply by binding lightwisps in the air. They got most of their snow at night, and trying to build like she had been while it was snowing.

No. There'd be too much trapped snow. She'd be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get the pockets of water out of the stone. Best to just wait until people have shoveled and swept out all the snow tomorrow.

"Oh, cheer up," Rian said. "I spoke to the masons, they're ready to help you touch it up tomorrow. Just have a little warmth and softened stone ready for them, and they'll take care of making the outside the smooth, even slopes that you want."

Lori grimaced. On the one hand, she didn't want other people nearby, getting in the way of her work and interfering because they thought they had an opinion she cared about. On the other hand… "They'd better," she said.

"Look, come inside for dinner, and I'll tell you the plan we came up with for tomorrow," Rian said.

Sighing, Lori pulled back her stone-shaping tool. "Fine, fine, let's go eat."

Looking at the wall she had made one last time, she cringed once more. Rian had better be right about the masons being able to do something about this. Even if it could act as an effective flood barrier, making something that looked so slapdash… it almost physically hurt, it really did.

Sighing one last time, Lori turned away and followed Rian inside for dinner.

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Stone Finishing

In the days that followed, the work continued on. Despite how… unsightly… the results were, Lori couldn't deny that simply pilingthe stone like that from the bottom up was getting the wall built a lot faster. Normally, simply piling up stone like that wasn't productive for her, since it would get unstable the higher she piled it up… unless she let it settle out naturally. Which made a pile that was wide at the base, too thick for the kinds of walls she usually needed to build. Except now that was exactly the kind of wall she was trying to make…

…

It was still unsightly. Even so, it was built, and it was better than nothing.

Fortunately, the masons that Rian had enlisted to assist her and organized were taking care of that unsightliness.

Lori kept glancing sideways at the stonemasons working on the wall, using long cords, weights, what looked like spikes driven into the dirt to hold the cords steady, and ladders. She left them a sizable amount of softened stone at the beginning of each day, the binding heavily imbued to last all day. They used shovels to move relatively large batches of stone and slapped them down onto the surface of the flood barrier, to fill in spots that were too low under the guidelines of cord that they had set into place. Where her attempts to make a smooth slope were too high, they used heavy metal chisels and wooden mallets to trying and level it down, or at least mark it for her to get at later.

For trying to smooth the surface of the walls, they alternated between using the wide, flat shovels modeled after she stone shaping too and metal hand tools that seemed a bit too small and delicate for working with softened stone, but the masons handled them deftly, and despite the fact that they could lift small amounts of the softened stone because of the weight, their quick, experienced movements meant they were making steady progress.

Part of their speed was because of what Lori had done to provide warmth. Rather than leave a binding hanging in the air—which would have been dangerous is someone walked into it—Lori had added a binding of firewisps to the completed portions of the wall, combined with a binding of airwisps that that kept a steady, hot breeze flowing parallel to the walls length. It wasn't perfect, but it was sufficient for keeping the areas where work was actually being done warm.

This allowed the masons, plasterers, volunteers and Rian—because of course he was there—to work without gloves, and some actually removed their winter robes and shirts. After the past few months of winter cold, it was very strange to see men with bare arms covered in sweat as they worked outside. Their discarded clothes were all pilled off to the side, marking a sort of border where the warm air didn't reach. The lack of warm clothing allowed them to move quickly and deftly, and the flowing warm air was able to mostly keep snow from melting on the stone they were working on, preventing water from being trapped.

As for Rian, he was helping by moving stone around with a shovel and placing it were the masons indicated. He was down to just a shirt, and he looked so happy to be warm. Sometimes one of the masons would give him their tools and he'd—very slowly—do what they had been doing while the mason put on their winter robe and went off, presumably to the latrine.

While Rian moved much, much slower than the masons and plasterers did, he actually seemed to know what he was doing when using their tools. Admittedly, the results were visibly inferior, but that seemed to be more from a lack of skill and experience rather than incompetence, and when the mason returned they very quickly corrected any defects, while Rian watched intently before going back to moving stone.

They usually managed to use most of the stone she provided them by the time it was time to stone working and go inside for dinner. There were surprisingly few bubbles of air that needed to be removed when she checked over their work before removing the binding on the stone at the end of the day.

It was fascinating to see them work as they put the finish on the stone flood barrier, but Lori knew better than to take more than glances. She still had more wall to build, taking stone from her stockpile and pushing it up the wall to pile it on top until it settled into place. It was a bit too high in places, going over the height she was trying to reach, but she that was fine. Getting rid of stone from the top was easier than trying to push it up—since when doing the former, gravity was in one's favor—so she left it for now, focusing on getting the rest of the wall the correct height and width.

Getting the length of wall that paralleled the river completed took only another day and a half, and most of that time was getting the air and water out from between the layers of stone after she placed them, and then properly fusing the stone together. She erred on the side of making the stone spread out a bit too wide, since as the wall progressed getting stone around to the other side to add mass to any flaws on the river-facing side became more and more annoying. There was more wall to skirt around, after all.

Never mind trying to get the stone to go over the top of the wall to get it to the other side. It was still stone, after all, and essentially pushing a large mass over a wall and trying to get it to drop down onto the other side… no. Too dangerous, too much mass. It would be far too easy for something to go wrong, some weak point breaking and then the mass would fall over the edge. Given that the dock and the water hub shed was on the other side of the flood barrier…

Yes, deliberately having excess stone on the wall so she could just trim it down later was the better option.

The result was an utter, unsightly mess of piles of stone on top of piles of stone, but it was the right height, about the right width where it mattered, anchored solidly to the stone foundation fused to the bedrock, and had no folds, hollows, bubbles or pockets of air, water, mud, snow, or anything else that threatened it's structural integrity.

When it was done, Lori was actually torn between working on smoothening out the wall's slope so that it would look flat and even, and continuing to build the rest of the wall, before reminding herself of the issue of time.

She also had to leave gaps in the wall while she built. After all, she couldn't block off the laundry area yet, since people still needed to do their laundry, so she was leaving that for last so she could build some stairs into it. Stairs that she wasn't quite sure how to make with stone without it ending up becoming slippery…

In case a sudden and abrupt thaw did happen, she intended to pack both gaps full of stone and hope for the best.

All in all, it took her six days of work to get the stone piled up into proper walls, even with the necessary gaps. That was far, far faster than she would probably have been able to finish if she had persisted trying to build the wall when she had begun. It took another three days of working with the masons and plasterers to smooth and level and surfaces of the walls. Lori started from one end and systematically fixed the bumps that the masons hadn't been able to chisel away, before assisting the masons by being the one to move softened stone onto the surface of the walls for them to shape and level, helping with her own stone-shaping tool as needed.

The only words exchanged to her were directions on where the craftsmen needed her to place stone. With their assistance and expertise, the surface of flood barrier finally managed to achieve a neat, flat slope in appearance, with a squared-off flat top that might not have been strictly necessary, but was far from unsightly and uneven and looking like piles of rolled wet clay stacked on top of each other.

Then, one final day and a half of work finishing the portion of the flood barrier near the laundry area. On the advice of the stonemasons, the stairs that she integrated on either side of the flood barrier there were inscribed with patterns. They weren't any particular shape, simply lines and whorls and in one instance the pattern a broom's quills made when it was brushed over the softened stone. The idea was to give the stairs a rough texture that would give feet traction on the wet stone, as well as providing depressions on the surface for water to sink to so that it wouldn't create a slippery layer.

And… it was done. The flood barrier that protected her Dungeon, and the buildings near it were complete. Well, not completely. She'd have to make a secondary water hub shed to let them draw water from the river when there was a flood… but from what she recalled of some of the waterways she'd passed in the city of her birth after a heavy rain or storm, the floodwater was usually murky and filled with debris, so the quality of the water would not be the best. Lori would have to see when the flood actually came. Should something similar also be the case… well, that's why they had a reservoir in her Dungeon.

"Ah," Rian sighed happily as they sat down for dinner that evening. Now that they were back inside the dining hall, he was back to being wrapped up in his winter robe, which had some stains on it from all the work. There was still a sheen of sweat on his face, which combined with his sensitivity to cold was probably why he was shivering slightly. Next to him, Mikon sighed and shook her head in exasperation, taking his towel from around his shoulders and wiping his face. "Finally, we're done! Now we no longer have to worry about the Dungeon getting flooded."

Lori frowned at him. "How did you get that idea?"

Rian blinked and stared at her with a comically horrified expression, one made more comical by how Mikon was in the middle of wiping the sweat from his cheek. "But… but… we're done! We made the wall and the stairs and everything! I was there! You were there!"

"We finished raising the flood barrier near the Dungeon's entrance, yes," Lori said. "Now I have to raise up another flood barrier near the tannery, to keep water away from it." It shouldn't take long, and since the ground was a little higher there, the barrier wouldn't have to be as high.

"Is there any chance you can be more relaxed about that flood barrier's appearance since you probably won't have to look at it ever again?"

Lori gave him a flat look.

He sighed as Mikon started wiping the back of his neck. "Yeah, I didn't think so. I'll organize people to dig up the soil there once you point out where the wall has to go and set up some bindings to keep us warm, I guess…"

Lori nodded. There was also having to build a binding to drain water from inside the area of the flood barrier, since a wall that can keep water out could also keep it in, and given how it was still snowing, that meant water was getting in. If she wasn't careful, her Dungeon might end up being flooded anyway…

She would also have to partially demolish the wall once the flooding was over and the rains began, but that was a concern for the future…

Through the sounds of the dining hall getting ready to eat, Lori heard someone cry out, and a shift in the tone of the dinner conversation. She turned her head in the direction of the first sound, frowning. "What is it?"

Rian had stood up, and when that wasn't enough to let him see over the crowd, stood on top of his bench as well. He peered over people, then sighed. "Unless I miss my guess, that's the sound of another woman's water breaking. Again."

Lori considered that, and sighed. She got up and headed for her room to get the warming stones so she could start binding firewisps into them while she ate…

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Diagnose Shanalorre

Finishing the second flood barrier meant to protect their developed areas from being flooded from the back—or upriver, as it were—took another four days of work. Snow had to be removed, dirt dug up, a stone foundation fused to the bedrock laid, the actual built by piling up stone, and then finally finishing the wall to make it stop being unsightly so that Lori wouldn't feel disgusted with the quality of its construction every time she had to look at it.

For all of that time, Shanalorre was once more in her demesne assisting with a birth, and then staying over to continue to monitor the health of her patients, as well as following up on her previous patients. Lori fretted, but decided to take the calculated risk to continuing work on the rear flood barrier while the other Dungeon Binder was present. The same volunteers—and Rian—were also working on building this wall, and while could remember the volunteers only vaguely the masons and plasterers currently stood out in her recollection, even if she didn't know their names. So even she should be able to identify if someone isn't supposed to be there, and with Rian present, he should be able to identify someone who didn't belong even if she was too busy to do so.

Of course, the other Dungeon Binder noticed the flood barrier. It would have been difficult for her not to, given she had to climb over it at the laundry area stares to get inside. She was full of amazement, curiosity and praise for the quality and speed of the construction, and Lori found herself being drawn into describing the process by which the wall was made. There was no harm in it, and it made Binder Shanalorre give more and more compliments.

Outside of meal times, the two of them didn't interact much. Lori had work to do, and technically, so did Shanalorre. When the younger Dungeon Binder wasn't spending an absurd amount of time in the baths, accompanied by her guide the brat, she was speaking to the demesne's doctors and medics. Given the conversation that Lori managed to overhear at a distance with airwisps, Shanalorre seemed to be trying to learn what she could about caring for patients and how to identify symptoms of illness at a distance.

"Why would she need to know that?" she demanded of Rian later that night after dinner, pacing back and forth. She had relayed the context of the conversation to him, which had been difficult because it meant she'd had to rememberit for most of the day. Lori was very aware of how much of the specifics of the conversation she had forgotten and had needed to convey in vague generalities in summary.

"Isn't it obvious?" Rian said as he sat at the foot of his bed while Mikon hummed and prepared the rest of it. Umu and Riz sat away from her at the bed's head and tried to pretend they weren't there.

"No," Lori said bluntly. "Which is what I have you for. To explain when people do things that are not obvious to me."

"Sometimes I wonder how much you really don't understand and how much you're just too lazy to think about," Rian sighed.

Lori glared at him. "You're calling me lazy?"

Rian shrugged. "You have to be lazy about something," he said. Over his shoulder, Lori saw Riz and Umu cast horrified looks at the back of his head, while Mikon just looked concerned. "Given how hard you work most of the time, it only makes sense that you're pulling resources away from something else so that you can sustain your work ethic. Actively not actually thinking at all about people's motivations fits the requirements." He waved his hand in a gesture she knew well. "Fine, fine. Obviously, Shanalorre is trying to educate herself in diagnosis. Basic and rudimentary diagnosis, at that, something even she can do without specialized and technical training."

Lori rolled her eyes. "Yes, but why?"

"To make the most of her limited ability to heal, most probably," Rian said. "That's my guess, anyway."

Lori raised an eyebrow. "To my knowledge, she can heal broken bones, infection, cuts upon flesh, and those are merely the injuries that I had that she managed to heal me off. From context, she can also heal disease and illness, regardless of symptoms or cause, and the only reason we do not know if she has an effect on poisons and venoms is that no one yet has been poisoned or envenomed. That is hardly limited." Rainbowed savants, making everyone else who actually had to learn how to do things look bad…

"Yes, by itself, her ability to heal is comprehensive. However, it's reliant on knowing people need to be healed," Rian said. "Things like broken bones, bleeding, and coughing up blood are pretty obvious signs that there's something wrong with your body, but what about symptoms that aren't obvious or ones that people actively try to hide?"

Lori frowned. "Try to hide…? Why would anyone try to hide symptoms of illness?"

"Well, it could be that they don't want to worry their family," Rian said. "Or that they genuinely think it's not a big deal and it will go away on its own. Or because they don't want to seem weak in front of other people. Or maybe it's cultural. Hey, Riz, how likely are militia to hide the fact that they're sick?"

"Rian, we're militia," Riz said, sounding indignant. "We are the first line of defense of the demesne's people. We stand out in the Iridescence and protect the farms and people forced to live beyond the edge from beasts and bandits. When disaster strikes, we are the first ones sent to relieve the people's suffering and begin rebuilding. When war calls, we answer. We are sinews of the Dungeon Binder, the strength of their arms that lift up their burdens. The militia never fail, never falter, through deadly colors and the might of the enemy."

"So, all the time?"

"Unless we're actually healthy and think we can get away with it because nothing important is happening," Riz said shamelessly. "Outside of that, militia don’t stop."

Rian nodded, turning back to face Lori. "The people left in Shanalorre's demesne are her direct relatives, militia and their families who decided to stay in the face of what seemed like utter disaster at the time and thus probably people she feels grateful to for helping keep her alive, people who had been too injured to be moved whom she healed and thus feel grateful to her, and people from our demesne who left to be away from… well, you."

"Idiots," Lori rolled her eyes.

"To put it another way," Rian said. "They're the only family she has left whom she is probably desperate to not lose after already losing her parents, militia who have both experience hiding their ills and are predisposed to hide them because 'militia never falter', people who have faith in her whom she probably doesn't want to fail, and…" Rian shrugged. "Well, the cynic in me wonders how many people try to get out of work by pretending to be sick but claiming they don't feel sick enough to need healing, they just need a few days of rest doing nothing."

Lori raised an eyebrow. "There's cynicism in you? I find that hard to believe. You're… you."

"I'll have you know I have a deeply cynical side. How else do you think I understand you so well?"

"I am not a cynic, I am a realist. Cynics are delusional people who always think only the worst will happen when there is no reason to suppose it will."

"Ah, my mistake. Nothing like you at all, then."

Lori nodded. Good, he understood.

For some reason, Mikon started coughing, and she hurried over to the jar of melting snow next to the fire to pour herself a drink.

"But to get to back your question," Rian said, "that mix of people are all verygood reasons for her to try to learn how to better diagnose people at a distance, or at while she's talking to them. For one reason or another, some people might not come to her to be healed if they're sick, so she has to be able to identify them if need be. Without any way to learn Deadspeaking, short of requiring everyone in her demesne to come to her every morning to be pre-emptively checked if they need to be healed, this is the best way and quickest way for her to make what skill she has more useful. I wouldn't be surprised if she's learned to identify and prioritize the severity of injuries."

Lori frowned. "Severity of injuries?"

"You know, identifying which kinds of injuries are more immediately life-threatening and which ones can be made to wait because they won't kill immediately. Head injuries are prioritized over broken bones, and injuries hat bleed a lot are prioritized over those that don't because of the risk of blood loss."

Ah. Yes, head injuries did need to be prioritized. Damage to one's brain would impact one's ability to use magic after all. For all that wizards were taught that magic was how the soul interacted with the world directly without having to utilize the intermediary that was the body, that intermediary was still very important.

Stil, Lori frowned. "I recall her saying that she can identify people who are ill by a general increase in the concentration of life within their bodies through her awareness of them. Wouldn't it be simpler if she used that as a basis for diagnosis?"

Rian blinked, staring at her. "People around you every day in your own demesne and who've helped you in your building projects multiple times, you can't even recall the name of, but that you remember?"

Lori frowned at him. "Why wouldn't I remember it?"

For some reason, Rian made a sound like he was trying to clear his throat, cough and scream at the same time.

"Are yousick?" she asked, leaning back slightly

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Rian eventually sighed, getting up and pouring himself from the jar of melting snow, before tilting his head back to drink. "Just… I'm fine."

"Why would she need to learn from our doctors and medics though?" Lori asked. "I'm almost certain they have their own." Fairly certain. Reasonably certain.

Rian shrugged. "Well, they do, but one of them is the uncle that tricked her into becoming a Dungeon Binder and seemed to be trying to use her as a figurehead to place himself in power for her own good, and one other whose name you probably don't remember. Given the fact that they might be too busy to teacher her or she might normally be too busy to ask them to, she's probably using this opportunity to have some many doctors and medics to learn from to… well, learn."

Ah. Well, she supposed that would make finding an opportunity to learn difficult. "Ah. Well, I suppose that would make finding an opportunity to learn difficult."

"Speaking of opportunities to learn… are you sure you want to continue with holding the community meeting tomorrow? It won't be difficult to cancel it for until after Shana leaves, even if I just told everyone tomorrow morning."

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "The sooner it's done, the sooner I can go do something actuallyuseful than hearing people complaining about wanting to own land."

"Are you sure?" Rian, why are you repeating yourself? "You have absolutely no problem with Shana and her lord seeing being present, hearing and seeing what happens, maybe see you sink someone into the ground to drown again…"

"Wait, she what?" Riz said just barely loud enough for Lori to hear. In response, Umu started saying something quietly to her, speaking directly into her ear.

"You were the one who wanted this, remember," Lori pointed out, responding to Rian. "We were going to hold it tomorrow, we're holding it tomorrow."

"All right then…" Rian said. "Though you realize that if the issue of land comes up again, Shana could get a lot of people to move to her demesne just by telling people she'll give them land like they want, right?"

Lori could help it, letting out a brief laugh. "Extremely unlikely," Lori said. "Binder Shanalorre has made it quite clear she has no intention to simply give people land."

Rian's eyebrows rose. "And… you believed her?"

Lori's laughter cut off like a piece of wood sliced on a water cutter.