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He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -
She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.
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imeanforever
thisvorlunatic
"I suspect there is a way to unconstrain you. Given the emphatic blink, I also suspect that the food had something to do with it. But clearly it hasn't solved the entire problem just yet."
thisvorlunatic
"I—hm, no, first: is there a time constraint of any kind operative here, should I be hurrying to get it figured out as soon as possible lest you vanish by morning or something of that general nature?"
thisvorlunatic
"Taking that as a 'no'. All right, good, I still want to solve this sooner than later but at least I'm not racing the clock. So, eating a pastry was step one. Is step two something I can personally accomplish without obtaining further resources?"
thisvorlunatic
He notices he has started fiddling with the glass and puts it down.
"Would it be useful for me to know how you came to be constrained in the first place, in order to guess how to undo it?"
"Would it be useful for me to know how you came to be constrained in the first place, in order to guess how to undo it?"
thisvorlunatic
"All right... were the constraints put in place by a person? They seem - guided, intentional."
thisvorlunatic
...That is not a good face accompanying that blink. These are not good implications, all together.
"Whoever they are, I am not getting a pleasant picture of them from the results of their actions..." He shakes his head slightly and returns to the immediate problem. "So you can be constrained deliberately by people, and I have the capacity to unconstrain you, but—only after I gave you that maple eclair?"
"Whoever they are, I am not getting a pleasant picture of them from the results of their actions..." He shakes his head slightly and returns to the immediate problem. "So you can be constrained deliberately by people, and I have the capacity to unconstrain you, but—only after I gave you that maple eclair?"
thisvorlunatic
"...It would be conceptually elegant, tentatively supported by the evidence, and also slightly unsettling if the maple eclair event somehow added me to a category of people who are able to not only remove constraints but also add more. Am I on the right track?"
thisvorlunatic
"Please warn me in some way if I seem about to do that. —Have I done it already?"
thisvorlunatic
"Understanding this problem just became a whole lot more urgent," he mutters, mostly to himself, wishing very badly to pace back and forth but not wanting to look away from her lest he miss a warning. "Something I can do, something I may already have done—" and there he stops and looks at her intently. "Is all this inexplicable constraint-management accomplished by speaking?"
thisvorlunatic
Okay, that's almost certainly cracked it, but it is imperative that he understand this system correctly before he starts messing with it.
"Verbal commands? Straightforward, such that if I approached this without special expertise I could allow you to speak and so on without accidentally making the problem worse in some unexpected hard-to-fix way?"
"Verbal commands? Straightforward, such that if I approached this without special expertise I could allow you to speak and so on without accidentally making the problem worse in some unexpected hard-to-fix way?"
imeanforever
She takes a deep breath. "Thanks," she murmurs. "...You might be looking for the sentence 'I rescind all your orders'."