dragonlady7

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jacquez45 reblogged your post and added:

No, it’s completely bonkers. There’s at least one other apparently-full-day shift in the book, when Kiru and Telimezh are on-duty overnight & in the morning, and possibly?? til just before the Winternight celebrations (Cala and Beshelar come on-shift when Maia isn’t paying attention, but it is implied that it’s after Maia returns to the Alcethmeret in the evening to get ready for the court dinner).So are they doing dinnertime-to-dinnertime? Do they take turns sleeping as well as eating at night? It’s a bad system! There should be 3 sets of nohecharei!Maybe the mazei are using wakefulness spells?

Honestly I guess this is where it shows that it’s just a single volume novel from a limited perspective, because I can’t fault the worldbuilding but obviously this wasn’t a perspective that the POV character had time to pay attention to and so we’re just not going to know. What kind of spells can the mazei even do?? Would Maia know? Do they really just take naps, are they allowed to do that? (In that case it’s a dick move when Maia doesn’t sleep the night after spoiler does his spoiler, it’s not like the others are gonna get a chance to nap while he’s pacing around haunting the place.)

[oh a question to look up when you get a chance please, since I returned my book without writing it down: what god is Kiru a cleric of, again??]

Watsonian: Maia didn’t notice/ The nohecharei despite having a matter of merely days’ advance notice to be trained as anything other than regular old guardsmen* are That Disciplined

Doylist: it seemed romantic to have sworn bodyguards and there wasn’t enough attention going spare to really consider what swinging 24-hour shifts would really do a person; be grateful there was enough attention paid to acknowledge the fact that nobody could do it totally unrelieved

also doylist: christ there are so many named characters in this book we don’t have the logistics to spare for a third set of nohecharei

In short I’m just going with 8-hour shifts for fanfic with the inevitable somebody gets the flu and the whole thing falls apart resolution, but it’s got to be that the author intended 24-hour alternating shifts and that! is! bonkers!

* and that’s another thing, they had like, 24 hours notice from the old Emperor dying to the new one showing up to be like “hey! we need to train a set of new nohecharei!” and like, presumably the maza are more prepared for exceptional things, being magic priests and all, but the Guard are just… I mean, they’re just soldiers! Do they all go through bodyguard training Just In Case / are there elite ones who go through the training Just In Case all the time so that they are theoretically always Elite Warriors and such, and so in the extremely rare event of needing new nohecharei there’s a pre-drilled pool to choose from? We just don’t know, and I’m really wondering how much of a factor Deret Beshelar being a humorless uptight sonofabitch who was probably Way Too Moral to play politics among the other officers was in him so quickly being chosen to fill the gap, and the fact that people actually liked Telimezh was responsible for the delay in choosing the next one? Like, Cala probably meditated on it for six or seven minutes and was like “hey that sounds groovy, I’m into this” and signed himself up, but Beshelar was like *stars in eyes* I Was Born To Disapprove Of This, and his CO was like, fuckin sweet get your stuck-up ass over there and glower at that kid posthaste.

ALSO if you never really have a day off, and you are a Fancy Trained Bodyguard, how are you expected to stay in shape? You spend every other day standing behind a guy, and then you’ve got to work out, get your cardio and your endurance, lift weights, sleep, eat, shit, do your laundry, practice your sword, get your hair cut, do your yoga, all in 24 hours? Bro’s gonna get fat and slow with no time for training. Maybe magic types can stay in shape but mans sword reflexes are gonna get rusty as hell!
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