They are talking about astral tracking of bonded foci, which is a similar test, but the duration is an hour.
Ah. Hadn't looked at that one. Though I have to say, I'm not sure it's better than just using the spirits' search ability, especially since the threshold goes up by 1 for every hour since the astral link was active--which is going to be at least 12, since they haven't been able to use the foci all day (and probably weren't using them that close to when we woke up, so that takes it even higher). Astral tracking's not limited by distance, sure, but the time difference (in this case) is huge.
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Hrm, let's play with the numbers. Assuming one can get 2 hits per test, and that it's only been 12 hours since the foci were active--a
very conservative estimate, if you ask me--and that there isn't a mana barrier or other form of concealment, we're talking about taking 9 hours for the astral tracking route. That's 54 10-minute periods, enough to do a (108,10 minutes) extended test search...the equivalent of searching for a non-living object concealed by someone with 10 magic behind a force 10 mana barrier up to 78 kilometers away from us.
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Of course, Yakima is about 200 km from Seattle, so if our gear's back home, then a search wouldn't do it for us.
Guess it depends on whether our mages figure that our gear is relatively close to where we are, or that we were actively using our gear relatively close to when we woke up.