At the back of the room, there's—a chorus of distant whispers, a wash of crackling static, a black wave of smoke that threatens to engulf whatever touches it. There's thoughts in there somewhere, if she dares to look close enough to see them, but nothing comprehensible makes it out past the noise.

The face that goes with this one... isn't. There's just a void there, wreathed in dark mist. The rest of her is just about as unsettling; the vapours shrouding her body part occasionally to reveal glimpses of a blackened skeleton, ending abruptly just above the hips. The veil of mist extends downward to the floor, though, in a shape that suggests a robe or dress. If there were legs under there she'd be very tall.

Then there's... whatever this is. She's easier to look at than the apparition, but that really isn't saying much. And there's something wrong with the way her mind is put together; it's like someone jammed two very different brains in a blender and made a chunky brain smoothie, and then somehow forced the results into a state where they more or less get along with themselves. Her sensory picture of the world around her is a multimedia kaleidoscope, and her thoughts slide around and turn inside-out and back again as they navigate her kludgy cognitive architecture. It all seems like it must hang together pretty well from the inside, but trying to decipher it is an exercise in confusion.

Her outward appearance isn't much better. She's very pretty, in an abstract sort of way, especially those enormous shimmering blue-green wings; but if you look closely at her body and actually think about the implications... there's a human torso in there, or parts of one, and some mostly-human limbs, but her arms are melded/entwined with long snaky tentacles and her head has a very unusual number and placement of eyes and her skin is covered in patches of chitin that look almost melted into her body, so that it's difficult to tell where the human ends and the moth begins. Even the wings aren't completely immune to the trouble; the shimmering blue-green gives way at the edges to a darker, raggeder green-black, and the transition is uneven in a way that suggests they might be as grafted-together as the rest of her.

Oh wow gosh pretty. She sort of wants to bounce over to the moth girl and ask her a thousand questions about how she's put together but she will, instead, not be doing that. Still. Goodness. 

She turns her attention next to the cheerful short girl. 

The cheerful short girl is—shielded, sort of. It's a fluid, subtle thing, and it does not at all prevent her radiant bubbly friendliness from shining out of her like a beacon, but nevertheless when Edie looks closer she does not get any clearly legible surface thoughts and instead gets a bright sparkly hi! I'm Iirve!

Hi! I'm Edie! Your telepathy is neat.

it's the same old stuff anybody could learn in my world, she says, shrugging a little although she hasn't yet looked back to see who she's talking to. oh, if you haven't hit it already, watch out for— (There's an impression of a mind, but Iirve seems to see them very differently than Edie does. She includes the face, too, and their location in the room: it's the very pretty woman sitting in the back row at the far left.) something in there bites if you look too close.

She glances at the woman, trying to look not-too-close. 

That sure is a very pretty woman. Everything seems perfectly normal on the surface; the shape of her mind at a glance is very much like a regular baseline human's. Up to Edie if she wants to peek any deeper than that.

Peeeeeeeeek.

Her surface thoughts are—a haze of adoring submission, tangled with fading threads of guilt and fear—and there's another mind there, wrapped up in hers, reaching through her to control her body—and somehow this arrangement feels compelling, alluring, wouldn't it be nice to be where she is—or where he is—to conquer and be conquered, to subjugate the weak and worship the strong? She's so happy.

And backing the fuck out! 

I don't know if would describe that as biting. Maybe I didn't get close enough for the biting part. Ew. 

felt pretty bitey to me, but it seems like we see this stuff differently

It was more like...sticking your hand in a barrel of really gross drugs, for me.

you know what, that's also a fair description

So what's your deal? You said anyone can do what you can do? I'm from a world where people are born with special abilities or other deviations from human baseline and some people decided they didn't like it and unleashed horrible murder robots about it.

mind magic is just a regular kind of magic! harder to find somebody to teach you, cause it was illegal until recently, but I got lucky. anyway, don't let me interrupt you, it sounds like you were in the middle of looking around when you saw me

Well, it was nice to meet you. 

Alright, what's up with that tall woman?

Her mind isn't quite human-shaped and it's not entirely clear why. Perhaps it's related to the fact that she's seven feet tall. Anyway, if Edie is still up for peeking at surface thoughts after that last fiasco, she will find that the tall woman is thinking about—

'She's looking at you,' says the red-haired man sitting next to her, glancing back over his shoulder toward the door.

The tall woman inclines her head slightly, acknowleding her—hallucination? spirit companion? imaginary friend?—'s words. She can sense the watchful presence at the edge of her thoughts, even if he hadn't said anything.

He smiles at her; there's an edge of wistfulness to it. 'I should really be going,' he says, but he makes no move to leave.

Nothing of the man's presence—no sight or sound or scent or hint of thought—is visible outside the woman's perception of him.

Well, if she knows. 

Hi, I'm Edie. Sorry for intruding. Well, sort of sorry. Nothing to you in particular, but if someone's going to try something I'd rather know in advance if I can get away with it. Which I may not be able to! So far you're the second of three to notice me and the third wasn't good. 

Hello, she thinks back at Edie, mildly amused. Reasonable enough. I'm Crystal.

'I can't actually tell what either of you is saying to the other,' her companion remarks.

Crystal smiles slightly but doesn't answer him out loud; she'd rather not acquire a reputation for talking to herself.

If Edie could get a read on him she'd bounce him stuff but, alas. 

What about the blond fellow with the long hair?

There's something wrong with him. 

Perhaps not wrong; perhaps this is simply another way for people to be. It doesn't seem like an especially desirable way to be, regardless. He feels no joy, no anticipation, just an endless string of quasi-numeric variables being weighed against each other. He constantly assesses and re-assesses the threat level of everyone in the room, and the possibility of murdering them; so far the "murder them" possibility is consistently vastly outweighed by other factors, but it is constantly present. He's noticed that the two of them have stopped short of the actual seating and is hypothesizing as to what they're doing; "mind read everyone" is in fact on the list but doesn't have a conclusive lead. 

(There are, if she looks closely, gaps where it seems as though something else ought to be.)

...Hm. She'll want to look deeper into him, in the future. 

What about that angel-looking person over there?

She is wrapped in a sort of melancholy serenity, meditating on the existence of suffering and on her divinely granted mission to lessen it. She doesn't seem to notice Edie looking.

Hm. And that androgynous auburn fellow over there?

Contemplating who in this room seems like they would make good prey. Idly wondering whether it would've been better to bring different genitals. Mildly annoyed that it's probably going to be inconvenient to set up a proper flesh pit here anytime soon and so "which genitals should I have brought" is actually a meaningful question.

Okay, so, the prey thing is definitely relevant, but now she has to know: what the heck is a flesh pit?

Well, there's a pit, which is made of flesh, and you put flesh in it, and it turns the flesh into other flesh. There's a connection to a god of some kind involved but Dima is hazy on the technical details and mostly only understands the direct practical aspects.

That is so concerning. 

Okay what about that woman with the drapey sleeve things. 

The woman with the drapey sleeve things is contemplating the logistics of waging a conventional war against the foreign dictator who is in the process of conquering her home country. Lots of math and administrative details, and plans branching out into entire forests of possibility as she accounts for the various resources Lord Rahl could have at his disposal. The picture in her head is not very optimistic, but she's patiently working it all out anyway. Her thoughts are kind of hard to follow; she has a tendency to skip rapidly through familiar chains of logic, leaping from premises to conclusions in a single bound.

(The logistics and conventions in question seem to be of an approximately medieval-to-renaissance tech level, with magic as a presence in the world but a rare and idiosyncratic one.)

Huh. Neat. And that stiff-looking person?

Standing near the back of the room, wearing a jumpsuit that calls to mind both janitors and convicts, and—

—there's something just under the surface of her mind, something that's all hard planes and crisp angles, like her thoughts are tucked away in a maze of softly humming prisms. If there's a way past the prisms and into the thoughts, it's not obvious how to find it. On the other hand, she doesn't seem to be reacting to the contact at all.

Hmm. She might want to poke at that. Later. 

She looks around to see if she missed anything important. 

There's a statue tucked into the corner, of a sad girl with wings, carved in exquisite detail.

...it's sort of weird that there's a statue in the room, and even weirder that there's a statue there, all the way in the back corner where the doors will block anyone just stepping into the room from seeing it. And if Edie looks closer... sure enough, there's a mind in there. So quiet and subtle that it's hard to notice her even when you're looking, but present all the same. And, if Edie looks at her quiet subtle thoughts...

Saying that she's sad is like calling a fish wet. It's not false, but it's also not obvious to the fish. This is just how the world is. She is sad, and lonely, but she has always been sad and lonely. She has not always been uncertain and afraid. Those are new, a reaction to her current environment. She isn't sure what's going to happen to her here but she's pretty sure she isn't going to like it. There's so many people, and all of them are here to learn about mind control, and in her experience people who are interested in controlling others are never good news.

What. 

Okay, the thing about people who are interested in controlling others is super valid but that's not, actually, her reason for being here...it's super super super weird that she just. Failed to notice. A mind??? What the fuck???

Hey, did you notice the, uh, statue, in the corner? she asks Iirve. 

took me a minute when I got here but yeah

Her ambient sadness level is extremely concerning.

isn't it though!

You kind of have to wonder what the world she's from is like. I mean, I'm from a literal apocalyptic hellscape and I'm not that unhappy. 

I mean, sometimes people are sad even though they don't live in apocalyptic hellscapes!

Usually people like that...notice that they are sad.

yeah she seems pretty depressed but I didn't poke around enough to find out why

I want to but she seems pretty benign so I'm not going to violate her privacy more than is necessary. 

reasonable!

Yeah. 

After a little while, the doors open again. 

The new arrival stands a little over six and a half feet tall, with blue skin, black hair, talons on his hands and bare feet, an asymmetrical assortment of horns, and folded batlike wings protruding from the back of his shirt. 

When he sees who else is in the room, he winces. 

To anyone who cares to check, his mind is mostly filled with guilt, connected to the wince. Apparently the fact that humans are people is new information to him and he has some Regrets. 

Con...cerning...but mostly not in a going-forward way? Probably? 

She pokes at the source of the guilt but flinches back before she can get any unwelcome details from the haze of sex and violence. 

The next person who enters is a cheerful-looking blonde woman carrying, oddly enough, a tape recorder. 

Her mind feels unsettlingly like the sensation of being watched. Underneath that, though, she's nervous and excited and oh so terribly curious. She's surveying the already-present students-to-be for potential threats, but the concept of "threat" in her mind is less associated with alert, alert! danger! and more with a sort of accepting half-fond resignation as of the neighbor's ornery cat who has dug up your tulip bulbs again. 

After that comes in a pale, possibly-albino woman with white hair in a style of dress you might imagine had been stolen off a hobo who used to be a flapper. 

Her mind is bizarre. It twists and turns and folds into itself at odd angles, and seems almost blueshifted, if thoughts were colors. 

But once you put in the effort to actually translate it, the thoughts themselves are fairly normal. She's nervous about interacting with this many people, she's worried for her brother, she hopes she didn't make a mistake in coming here. 

There's a low-grade chronic hunger in the background of her physical awareness, and an accompanying low-key strain of fear. 

The chronic fear in the mind of the next arrival is much less low-key. She is sort of vaguely hopeful that maybe everything won't be terrible forever, and this is a fairly novel sensation, but she's trying not to let it distract her from constant situational awareness of everything in her environs that could possibly pose a threat to her. She notices the statue right away, but less as a person and more as a landmark feature someone might jump out from behind in order to attack her. She is high-key terrified, not even necessarily of anything in particular, but just in general. 

And then the most unspeakably beautiful person anyone in this room has ever seen walks in.

Her hair falls in a long single braid down her back to nearly touch the floor, and she strides with a casual grace and confidence that humanizes her ethereal beauty enough to make her more attractive than intimidating, and all this only makes it even more striking that she is not, actually, hotter at a glance than the possessed girl, despite being objectively more beautiful.

Her thoughts run slightly too fast and in slightly too much depth to follow completely in real time, but she is mostly thinking about how relieved she is to not be attending another fucking art exhibition.

Sadly, no matter how interested she is, she cannot really justify asking Edie to ransack this woman's head for memories of art. 

At a direct, unobstructed glance, the next entrant appears to be a perfectly normal boring milquetoast brunet white boy. 

If, however, anyone happened to see him out of the corner of their eye, there is definitely something off about him. Is that hair or a mushroom? A sleeping animal, perhaps? Is that skin, or bread? Wood? A discolored fold of linen? 

His mind appears as though through a funhouse mirror, but he is definitely assessing the room for targets. 

The next two people to enter the room are also unfairly beautiful, although not quite in Ysandre's tier of exquisitely crafted physical perfection or Bree's tier of raw sexual appeal. They come as a set, and they're not literally in telepathic contact with each other but you could be forgiven for assuming they were from a quick glance at their surface thoughts; they know each other so well that it's like each has an echo of the other in his head.

One of them is taller, with delicately pointed ears peeking out of his shoulder-length brown hair, and seeing the room mainly in terms of physical position and movement: who's standing or sitting where, which directions they could most easily move in. He leads his companion to a seat near the back that doesn't block anyone's exit and isn't close enough to anyone to pose an immediate physical threat.

The other is shorter, with wavy red hair and human-shaped ears, and taking in the contents of the room in much more depth and detail. He sees the way Emily and Edie make a clear unit with one another, and catches a hint of shyness in the moth lady's body language, and as soon as a backward glance reveals the statue he immediately surmises that it must be a fellow student even though he can't see how.

And there's something else about the tall one, a subtle undercurrent in his mind—like stress, but not quite the way most people experience stress. A constant underlying tension, which he can work around with practiced ease but never fully ignore. Twice, in the time it takes them to cross the room, an image flashes across his mind of grabbing the nearest person and breaking their arm or throwing them into a wall; both times, he dismisses the impulse as soon as it forms, but for just that brief flickering instant he wants to.

The redhead, meanwhile, turns out to be telepathic enough to catch Edie looking, although it takes him a couple of seconds. He glances at her and silently raises an eyebrow. It's obvious why she'd want to read everyone's mind, of course, and assuming her intentions are otherwise benign he doesn't exactly object, but he is curious what she's going to do about being caught.

(In parallel with that, he's thinking about Liamar's likely distress at the invasion of privacy, and calculating possible ways of getting the stranger to stop; asking nicely is the obvious first line, of course, but if that doesn't work is it viable to use force? Probably not; he doesn't think he's going to end up being the most powerful telepath in the room, certainly not more powerful than someone who reads everyone casually as they come in, and even if he might be, he doesn't think it would be wise to start a fight in the auditorium. This entire train of logic flashes wordlessly through his mind with the speed and ease of someone to whom this kind of tactical calculation comes as naturally as breathing.)

Hi! Yeah, you're not the first one to catch me. I haven't been reading more than just enough to confirm non-hostility; I've stopped. She shows him a snapshot of her own sensory experience, which includes perception of each mind in the room but not, actually, a read on anyone but him and Emily, and she's dropped down to basic communicative on him and is sharing as much with Emily as she's getting off her. You guys seem neat. Is your friend okay? Context: the brief dip into his friend's mind that she did get; emotional affect: concerned for rather than by him. 

Not especially, he admits, with a hint of wry dark humour. After a silent shared glance with his companion, he elaborates, My lord has a problem and we are here in search of a solution.

He can't quite figure out how to put the problem into words, and so sends her a network of linked concepts instead: the underlying stress she saw, and the pattern it follows of always tightening up and never winding down until one way or another it snaps and releases into an outpouring of violent rage. Atali's own attempts to offer Liamar an alternate outlet by giving him vivid waking dreams, only to find that imaginary violence didn't work; something about the true embodied experience of beating someone to death is necessary to the process, and whatever it is, Atali at least can't figure out how to counterfeit it with his current powers. So for now they do their best to find minimally harmful outlets, and in the long term Atali wants to become good enough at altering minds to make those outlets unnecessary.

Eesh, that's unfortunate. If I happen to run into anyone with complementary kinks I'll let you guys know. Uh, if he wanted me to try fixing the problem I'd be willing to try but I'd want to look at his mind in much more detail first and even aside from the privacy thing I wouldn't expect him to trust a stranger to mess with his head.

Indeed he would not, but I thank you for the offer.

What if anything do I have permission to say to someone potentially compatible?

You can give them what I gave you.

Okay. Thanks. Good luck. 

The next one into the room is a tall woman with a swimmer's physique, radiating confidence and some kind of pleasant, musky perfume. 

She's intrigued by the possibilities the university offers, but not in a predatory way; she very much likes helping people and sees this as another avenue to do that. Not to mention the fantastic scientific knowledge this place offers...

She scans the room, raises her eyebrows when she sees the unfairly beautiful people, and, on the basis that they're closer, heads towards the most recent pair. 

She takes a chair a row back, so she isn't actually pressuring them into interacting with her just by proximity, and says, "Hello." 

Atali looks back at her with a slight smile. "Hello," he says, with less enthusiasm but still some friendliness.

"So I hear people outside my little corner of the multiverse do gender differently than they do where I'm from. Wanna help me investigate?"

"Well, I wouldn't rule it out immediately but I can't say I came here with that sort of thing in mind."

"Mmkay. Nice meeting you anyway, I'm Dafina." 

"Atali. Likewise."

"Cool." 

She gets up and heads over to where the other unfairly beautiful person is. 

"Well hello there."

"Hi! Is it true that most people in the multiverse have a binary gender system?"

"Technically I can't answer that for most of the multiverse but it's pretty common in the galaxy I'm familiar with."

"That sounds fascinating. On my planet, we have six." 

"That sounds fascinating. Sociologically or biologically or both, depending."

"I'm a biologist by trade, myself. I'm sure the sociological aspect is fascinating but I have less of an idea where to start."

"I'm not a biologist but 'biologist' is kind of a relative term where I'm from, I was genetically engineering pretty butterflies with all the other six-year-olds as a kid, I just didn't make it my life's work."

"--That's adorable and I'm jealous."

"I got this lovely purple gradient on their wings! I can probably dig up the pictures sometime if you want to see."

"I'd love to!"

The next person to sweep into the room is a young man in flowing black robes with a carefully neutral expression hiding disdain for literally everyone else in the room. He definitely plans to bring everyone else to heel, ultimately, but he's not going to start right now, so. He'd really like to not be taking classes with a bunch of Muggles and magical creatures, but you take the opportunities you're given and he really does need to deal with the Voldemort problem. 

The next one is a cheerful but slightly nervous young woman who really hopes this doesn't get too messy. She knows why she's here, but doesn't really reflect on it; she's not a huge fan of the reason but, you know, magic, advanced tech, fun stuff. 

After her comes a light-skinned black woman with big earrings, a leather jacket, and lightly ripped jeans. She surveys the scene with a calm, self-satisfied confidence, and sprawls sideways in her seat when she takes it. 

Underneath the confidence there is a practiced wariness. This is a woman who's gotten in a lot of fights, and ultimately emerged victorious from every one that mattered. She's had to lie, cheat and steal to get where she has in life, but now that she has a solid power base, she can afford to be honorable and kind. And she needs the resources MCU offers to finally defeat her greatest rival, that fucker Lia Malolu. 

The next entrant is pissed off. 

Not at anyone here. It's just sort of a background fact of life, that she's super fucking pissed at her stupid-ass evil petty asshole dickwad ex-boyfriend. 

If this place lets her get out from under his curse, she almost doesn't care what else happens to her. Almost. 

Meanwhile given the givens the curse is definitely going to happen to her here, a bunch. Bleh. 

Also holy shit hot people. Unfairly hot people. Aaaaah. 

Hi, I'm a telepath, I've been reading everyone here at least a little to make sure they weren't planning to, uh, brain-shiv me, do you want to explain your problem a little more so I can see what I can do to help?

You know what, sure. 

Her evil ex-boyfriend is Elexarin. He is literally a god. He was sweet for a while but eventually he turned controlling and possessive and she wanted Out and he was not letting that happen so eventually she killed herself. 

She woke up immortal and cursed. She...gets raped. A lot. It's pretty horrible. She doesn't want to dwell on most of the details. 

It's probably going to happen here, and she would like not that, but also she kind of wants to sleep with any of the unfairly hot people. 

'Kay, so first of all when we're done here I will happily squish your ex like a bug. 

Second of all, what's the definition of rape, here, can it be gamed? 

Third, how do you feel about pain?

The definition of rape is stupidly heteronormative. Basically it involves a guy sticking his dick in her without explicit verbal consent or too-blatant nonverbal consent. She's managed to game it ever but it's sorta difficult to communicate consent in a way the curse won't pick up on, although, okay, telepathic intermediary, promising avenue. 

She's gotten used to pain. It's not the part she hates. 

This could potentially work out remarkably neatly, then. 

She reflects the memory of her conversation with Atali into the new girl's mind. 

You know what, it's not my kink exactly, but count me in. Someone ought to get some use out of this bullshit. 

Excellent. May I share your circumstances with them?

Absolutely. The less I have to say out loud, the more likely this is to work.

She starts walking towards the unfairly beautiful dudes. 

Meanwhile, Edie says to Atali, Hey, guess what?

He isn't actually looking at Elodea, but nevertheless says, You've found someone and are sending her our way?

Yep. She's, uh, not exactly complementary kinks, but

And then she shows him her conversation with Elodea. 

I see. Yes, I think we can work with this. Thank you.

You're welcome. 

Elodea sits down next to Atali. "So I hear I and you guys have complementary problems," she says lightly. 

"I've heard something similar," he says. "Hello."

"Hello. I'm Elodea Crescentlake." 

"Atali. Pleased to meet you."

"Pleased to meet you. What's your friend's name?" She nods in a not-talking-as-though-you're-not-present way at Liamar. 

"Liamar. He's feeling shy at the moment."

Low voice: "Shy, or that thing where when I'm trying not to scream at someone talking is a bad idea?" 

(Liamar smiles wryly.)

"Well, mostly shy."

She glances at Liamar and smiles a little and bites her lip and shivers. "You know what, that is entirely fair." 

Atali smiles at her.

Someone walks into the room.

She has yet another kind of bizarre mental architecture. It's not a blast of noise or a crystal maze or a tangled mishmash of things that were never meant to go together; it's... fluid, amorphous, strangely distant. Almost reminiscent of the statue's unobtrusive faintness, except that this one isn't hard to notice so much as it's hard to look at. It's as though her mind is twisted halfway out of reality along some alien axis, or partly concealed behind a veil of fog. And even the parts that are visible are put together strangely, and need focus and attention to decipher.

After all that, though, the visible contents are actually pretty benign. She's looking around, noting the position and appearance of everyone in the room, drawing conclusions about their possible origins and abilities, finding a place to stand behind the rows of seats and heading there. No predatory undertones; not, in fact, really any thoughts about how she plans to interact with people at all, besides wanting to avoid anyone who seems plausibly able and willing to cause her harm.

Oh, also, she has the upper body of a human woman and the lower body of a giant spider. It's a very pretty giant spider, if giant spiders are your thing—sleek, elegant, armoured in glossy black chitin that matches her hair. A bit startling, though, if you weren't expecting it.

Holy gosh she's beautiful. 

The next person through the door doesn't walk. They float, darting through the air and peering about cautiously whenever not in motion. 

Of all the people in the room, the most recent arivee and the shadow-engulfed static-brained person frighten her the least. She herself is only technically humanoid, and she's had bad experiences with humans in the past. 

But she doesn't want to be all alone forever. 

Next is a very pretty man, in a long dark grey robe and with a bandolier across his chest with, of all things, seven bells of increasing size on it. Each one is strapped in so that it cannot make any accidental noise, which is important; a corner of his mind is constantly concerned with bell safety. The bells are magic and undirected ringing would be very dangerous. 

He's optimistic that even if he doesn't end up in charge of whatever arrangement the class falls into, he can at least persuade whoever does to see his goals through. 

Then there's yet another insect person! This one's a bee girl. She has black hair and glittering black eyes and a buttercup-yellow face and lovely delicate fluttery bee wings and is short and cute and mostly humanoid in shape; it's not completely clear whether her armoured bodysuit, adorned with bands of black and yellow fuzz, is part of her or a separate piece of clothing.

She's kind of nervous, but also excited. The Queen has for some reason entrusted her with coming to this place and learning all its secrets, and if she does well she can bring them all home and the Queen will be so happy!

And then, after her, another winged person, this one with large feathered wings, auburn banded copper. 

She's nervous about this place, but it seems like her best bet to win a better life for her and her family, and so she cannot pass it up. 

Breaking the wings theme, the next person seems to be entirely human, at least in appearance.

She is... wary, but in a cheerful sort of way? She's used to being surrounded by hostile forces with the power and inclination to hurt her, and she's used to dealing with being hurt a lot as a result, and she doesn't expect this place to be that different but she's happy about the part where she gets to walk around like a real person for a while first. And who knows, maybe she'll find another universe to run away to. Maybe she'll find someone to run away to it with! Maybe she'll learn enough mind control to make going back to her current world a viable option, although it'd have to be a fuck of a lot of mind control and honestly she'd really rather just abandon that entire universe and never look back.

The next man to walk into the room is wearing something that looks like a catholic priest's robe had a baby with a death metal band. He holds a wooden flute loosely in one hand, and his thoughts are largely tactical calculations about how to subjugate everyone else present. 

Elodea, who had turned to look at the newcomer, pales and hisses. 

Concerning.

"That guy is a cleric of Qaldehelun," she says softly. "And that may or may not be an infamous divine artifact he's holding." 

"I might like to ask you more about that later."

Nod. 

This guy's brain is so concerning. 

The next arrival is shielded, but imperfectly; wisps of thought escape the barrier around his mind as he moves through the room to take a seat off to the side near the front. Although outwardly he appears calm and collected, inwardly he is nervous and unsettled, worried about being so far from home among people with such unknown capabilities. (Also, he's a little irritated that there are people here who are prettier than him. It's not the first time this has ever happened, or anything, but he takes a lot of pride in his appearance and he's not used to being so thoroughly shown up from so many angles at once.)

Emily ducks her head behind the seat backs and successfully muffles the noise of her giggles. Anyone with enhanced hearing may still detect them, but no one with human standard ears farther away than her sister will hear her laughing. 

The next person who enters the room is--there's really no better word for it--horrifying. 

Outwardly, they project the mien of a cheerful, bubbly, attractive teenage girl. The mind inside, however, is ancient and cunning and extremely preoccupied with causing as much suffering to other people as possible. Sure, it's only pain they draw power from, but that's no reason not to indulge. As their eyes sweep over every other inhabitant of the room, their outward appearance is almost secondary to the internal calculation of: from their behavior, what can I derive about how to hurt them as much as possible? 

Holy crap, Edie lived through a murder-robot apocalypse and has secondhand memories of the Holocaust and some of those images are new and disturbing to her. 

The door opens.

All attention in the room is instantly drawn to the person who walks in. The effect is brief, fading as soon as you see her, but it's powerful; the interruption breaks trains of thought and cuts short murmured sentences.

She has long straight jet-black hair, glowing golden eyes, and a faint shimmering pattern of scales gleaming on her porcelain-pale skin. Her fingernails are opalescent claws with short sharp points. Her hair is ornamented with pins and combs shaped like stylized flames, and the black silk robe that swirls in the wake of her long stride is embroidered with more flames in red and gold.

Trying to read her mind is like staring into the sun, or plunging your hand into hot coals. It burns in there. But you don't need to be a mind-reader to feel the confidence radiating off her. She's—not spoiling for a fight, exactly, there's no eagerness there—but expecting one, expecting many in fact, and expecting to win them all.

Whoa hello. 

Nerding thoroughly interrupted, she gets up and slinks over to the newomer. 

"Hi, you're gorgeous."

The newcomer is still walking toward a seat in the middle of the room; she glances at Dafina without breaking stride and raises her eyebrows slightly, as though to say yes, and your point is?

Dafina raises an eyebrow of her own and sweeps her gaze up and down the newcomer's body, as if to say, what do you think my point is?

She doesn't maintain eye contact long enough to see the gesture. A few seconds later, she's found her seat and is sitting in it.

(She smells like fire.)

...Hot. Figuratively as well as literally. 

Still, she can tell when her advances aren't wanted. She returns to the most unfairly beautiful person to continue talking about the endocrine system. 

It's not long before the next student arrives.

She is definitively the smallest person in the room, two feet tall if that, and her delicate wings make a sparkling blur in the air behind her as she darts and hovers near the back of the room. Her dress is a clingy silver-grey thing like a figure skater's leotard, with a skirt of artistically ragged ribbons so light and gauzy that they nearly float on the air.

Her mind is shielded. Trying to touch it stings slightly, like a zap of static electricity.

What if a little stinging doesn't deter you?

When she pushes, there's a flash of pain much stronger than the initial sting—and the fairy girl flinches back a little, too, like it hurt her just as much. All that's visible in that brief glimpse of her thoughts is a wordless impression of playful curiosity.

Whoops. 

The fairy takes a moment to recover, orients herself, shoots Edie a somewhat nervously grumpy look, and then darts forward to perch on the back of a seat somewhere near the middle of the room, well out of Edie's way.

The next person who enters the room is generally unremarkable - on the pretty side of average for most contexts, maybe, but this room has a higher average than usual - except for the fact that her surface thoughts are all about biochemistry. Not even mind-control-related biochemistry. She's thinking over the implications of a recent experiment - something about producing synthetic spider silk - contemplating how she might follow up on it, what the most promising next steps are, which relevant papers she should reread before moving forward. It gets a bit technical and the details are hard to follow.

She absently finds an otherwise unoccupied row in the middle-back and takes a seat right next to the wall.

Edie notes down some of the general resources for future reference, observes that this person doesn't look immediately threatening or interesting, double-checks that impulse to make sure she thinks that for reasons and not because of some subtle don't-pay-attention-to-me effect, and then settles down when she's satisfied that that's the case. 

There's a gap of about a minute before the next one.

He looks to be somewhere in the late teens/early twenties age range, and his surface thoughts are mostly occupied by the empathic landscape of the room. He's getting a lot of depth and detail on everyone's emotions, and processing it all, and reflecting it in little eddies of reaction, but not really having thoughts about it per se; the vast majority of his mind seems to live on the physical and emotional levels, in the movement of his body and the input of his senses and the direct concrete experience of existing. Within that framework, though, his analysis of the dynamics of the room is pretty nuanced; he notices the way Elodea is sitting with Liamar and Atali, and the way their emotions interact, and he isn't quite sure what's going on there but he definitely concludes that there's something like an alliance or friendship forming tentatively on shaky ground between Elodea and the Liamar/Atali unit. He notices Crystal having friendship-shaped feelings toward someone he can't sense at all, and makes a pretty close guess from her body language about where they're sitting.

He doesn't notice the statue in the corner, at least not in the first two seconds while his direct line of sight to her is still blocked by the door.

Edie decides to be friendly, and gives him a wordless mental nudge that communicates hi! and this person exists (you're not the first one not to notice right away)

—huh. He glances back toward the corner and then over at Edie, picking her out of the crowd because her feelings match her telepathic communication in timing and content. (Along the way he refines his picture of the Emily-Edie unit a little, observing that their connection is not just familiarity but actual telepathy because of the way the echoes propagate between them. He's still undecided about Liamar and Atali but is leaning toward 'they just know each other really well'.)

Because she's communicating on his level, he says hi back the same way he'd announce himself at home: he reaches out with his power and taps the outermost edges of her mind with a gentle nudge containing everything he feels about her, curious/intrigued/friendly/thoughtful/grateful/wary/attracted/pleased, wrapped up neatly so that even if she wasn't already a telepath she'd be able to tell that these were someone else's feelings and not hers. The way his power works seems to have almost no overlap with her own; he can't speak telepathically, wouldn't even know how to try, and it takes active skill and effort—though it's well-practiced enough to end up pretty seamless—for him to use his projective empathy as communication instead of mind control.

--Huh. She bounces back a package of information containing

handwave

her telepathy is receptive not just projective (this is how you respond) 

curiosity whether her natural defenses block his emotional mind control? if he wants to try to shove something minor at her to see if it works (whether it takes more effort if it does work) that'd be cool (if now seems like not the time the offer's open) 

(Emily turns and waves physically.)

He shrugs slightly as he heads for the back row to find a seat, returning Emily's wave along the way. Sure, seems like it'd be interesting to find that out.

Using his power this way is much easier, more fluid, more natural. He taps Edie again, much harder, with a spike of mild startlement—the kind of thing you'd feel if you heard a sudden noise that was louder than expected but not painful or alarming.

Her defenses catch it, but—barely. It's not at all clear whether she'd still be able to block him if he tried harder; it's not at all clear whether he knows how to try harder, because he's never encountered a power that could shield against him like that. It's an interesting feeling and he's not sure what to make of it.

She observes, privately between herself and her sister, that if the two of them fought now it would probably come down to first-mover advantage, possibly modulated by the limitations of what he can make her feel and how those feelings impede her. Also possibly modulated by Emily but that might depend on if she even had a chance to intervene. 

He takes a seat and settles in to passively listen to everyone's feelings. (Wow, the sad statue is having a time. He taps Edie again with a nudge that, if translated into words, would read something like wtf is she okay??)

Almost in the same moment, the next student enters the room.

She's easily Crystal's height, more if you count the horns. Her long barbed tail sweeps back and forth with serpentine elegance as she walks, and her half-mantled wings gleam with a dull red light that also shines faintly from beneath her ash-grey skin. Her fingers and toes end in long curving talons with razor-sharp points. The overall impression is undeniably demonic. In a room like this one, her unnatural beauty falls a little flatter than it otherwise might have, and the expression on her face isn't helping; she looks around her with utter contempt, dismissing everyone present as unworthy of her attention.

There's not much going on in her head that her face wasn't already saying, although there's plenty of extra detail available, most of it very concerning. She doesn't exactly hate everyone here, because hatred is an emotion reserved for people who are worth thinking about, but she expects to take some amount of satisfaction in crushing them all. Some of them might turn out to be useful and she supposes she will have to put up with letting those ones keep the ability to speak and act and sense their environment, at least temporarily; the rest, though, are going to stop having experiences other than pain. (It's offensive to her, on a deep level, that anyone gets to have experiences other than pain.)

She stalks up the aisle between the two blocks of seats, toward the woman with the drapey sleeves, and she recognizes that there is someone in her way but she has no intention of slowing down or turning aside to accommodate their presence. It's up to the stranger whether to get out of the way or be trampled.

Edie is going to destroy that person. 

Between the Nazis and the Sentinel-creators, that kind of malicious entitlement just scrawls aaalllllllll over Edie's trauma buttons. Also it is actively evil. Fuck that bitch. 

The sheer magnitude of the wash of RAGE that passes over her would be hard for an empath not to notice, no matter how little attention they were paying her. 

(This here empath sure does notice it! He gives Edie a gentle nudge of supportiveness, because, yeah, wow, fuck that, although he's also thinking to himself that he feels a little sorry for the horrible demon bitch. The horrible demon bitch kind of seems like she has never experienced joy in her life.)

The woman with the drapey sleeves steps gracefully out of the horrible demon bitch's way.

(Edie is kind of too busy being traumatized to feel sorry for the horrible demon bitch but plausibly she will appreciate this perspective later.)

Another new student enters the room!

Physically, she is petite and pretty, with dark purple-black hair and a delicate chin. Mentally, she is... in love? The feeling fills her completely, deep and calm, wrapping her up like a comforting blanket. She walks with serene grace, hardly paying attention to her surroundings, secure in the knowledge that her beloved will protect her from all harm. Her beloved is always with her, closer than her own skin. It's not clear who or what her beloved is, at least not at a glance; there's no obvious second mind parasitizing hers like there was with that other girl. If there's anything like that going on here, it's happening much more subtly.

She bounces the general sense to Sean along with the memory of his deducing the location of Crystal's friend and a querulous tinge.

He turns to glance back at the newcomer, and then tries to send Edie his impressions the way she showed him how to talk to her, clumsily because it's not a mental motion he's used to, but he doesn't actually think his power can fully communicate the weirdness here.

Body-language-wise, yeah, whoever she's thinking about is definitely in there somewhere, demonic possession or alternate personality or something along those lines; she's not carrying herself like they're nearby, she's not carrying herself like they're absent, she's carrying herself like they're in there with her.

Empathy-wise... there's something there? It's weird because it's not actually present, it's... the whole shape of how her emotions fit together is built around the expectation that there will be someone else to share them with, a little bit like how Emily and Edie are with each other, a little bit like that other girl who is much more blatantly possessed, a little bit more like the way his people are at home. (The way they used to be, anyway... he shoves that train of thought aside as a distraction; he didn't mean to include it in the first place but he is, as previously mentioned, not good at this.) He can't directly sense her demon or headmate or imaginary friend or whatever it is, but he can tell that she's used to never ever ever being alone in her own head.

His best guess is that she's possessed like that other girl and the demon is just way better at hiding, maybe like the tall girl's imaginary friend, maybe like the statue in the corner only way more so. If it's not that then his next best guess is that she's crazy, and her 'beloved' is a power she has or some kind of magic artifact or spell or other thing that isn't a person but that she thinks of as one. Or maybe she has multiple personalities naturally, he's vaguely aware that that's a thing that might sometimes happen, and the other one isn't turning up as a separate mind because they aren't, and they're not turning up as part of the same mind as the girl because they're not conscious right now so there's nothing there to see. But if he had to bet, his money would be on possessed or crazy, because the way the feeling of safety intertwines with the feeling of love is so present and immediate, it really comes across like she expects her imaginary friend to be watching her at all times and ready to move in her defense at a moment's notice.

Huh. Interesting. 

She bounces back her experience of people with multiple native personalities cross-referenced with what people feel like when they're unconscious and the ways this doesn't match. Her guess is possessed or something weirder; crazy isn't impossible but it seems a lot less likely here in particular than weird mind-control-related stuff. 

He's never met someone with multiple personalities but he's pretty sure he wouldn't be able to see a second personality that wasn't actively having thoughts or feelings at the time. Probably it's different if you—

Mid-thought, he is interrupted by a blast of intense anxious misery. His head turns involuntarily to look at the door.

The girl just stepping into the room is anxious and miserable! And a whole heaping tangle of other emotions, most of them negative!

Probably someone is going to do awful things to her but at least she's pretty sure she can make them regret it, and they'll be different awful things than the awful things she's used to. And it's nice to be wearing clothes again, although she could wish for more than Literally Just A Dress, and it's nice to be in brightly lit spaces again, although she could wish for her glasses back because without them she still can't fucking see. Still, though, overall this is undeniably better than where she was ten minutes ago.

She walks, barefoot and grumpy about it, directly toward the most accessible chair-shaped blur that doesn't have a person-shaped blur attached.

--She gives everyone she's had relatively friendly interactions with a ping, [this girl/new girl] [lost her glasses/can't see] [gonna offer bounced visuals of all consenting parties] [consent: y/n]

Sure why not.

Crystal would rather not.

Iirve is fine with it!

Elodea not only consents, she turns in her chair to offer a more useful field of view. 

Atali declines on his own and also Liamar's behalf.

Edie sends the new girl, Hi, I'm a telepath, do you want a clearer visual of the room from a variety of consenting subjects who don't need glasses and lack them?

Her reaction to uninvited mental contact is PANIC followed immediately by RAGE followed immediately by an impulse to shout out loud in the most bone-achingly painful idiom she can think of, but she stops herself before the words make it out of her head. Unfortunately for the telepath who is currently reading her mind, the words do make it into her head, and just hearing her think them feels immediately, viscerally, physically and mentally painful. (April herself is resistant but not immune to the effect; she staggers and clutches the back of an empty chair, overcome by a wave of nausea.)

Ow. Is that a no?

She has not actually managed to process what the question even was, and doesn't have much attention to spare for trying to figure it out right now because she's busy trying not to throw up.

Do the sensations seem atypical such that ameliorating them would plausibly go wrong in some new and exciting way. 

Sean taps Edie gently with his power, communicating concern. He tries to express to her mindreading how the girl's panic-flinch read to him as fitting a certain pattern, and the timing makes it look like she was reacting to Edie trying to talk to her, and his best guess is that this girl has had Very Bad Experiences with telepathy or something like it, and it would maybe be a good idea to stop trying to talk to her that way, especially since it seems like she succeeded in hurting Edie about it once already.

--Yeah okay. He's right. 

Shortly after this latest arrival has found a seat, a figure appears in a flash of light. 

Every physical feature of this person looks different to each of the assembled students (although the effect is likely somewhat lost on April). They look perfect. Gorgeous. The platonic ideal of Sexy Dom, for whatever that happens to be for any given person. 

"Your attention please!" they call out. 

That's a pretty good way to get people's attention!

"Thank you." They clasp their hands, still beaming. "While I have many names, the one that all of you shall know me by for the following year is Mesmerra—Dean Mesmerra, for I am the founder, administrator and absolute ruler of this school." Pause for effect. "I am a god of mind control. That's not bragging! I am not merely deific in skill, but a literal deity who draws power from every instance of mind control in every single world I touch. And the number of those is always growing." They toss their hair a little, not quite smug, merely supernally self-assured.

"Welcome to Mind Control University. Ours is an intensive program, and by the end of the year every single one of you will have the power to bring nations to heel with nothing but your own will and a box of scraps. Of course, this is a competitive program as well, in more ways than one—some of you will no doubt be Emperors and Empresses in your own right before the year is out, while others...may be pets, or toys, to the others. Remember," they wink, "do unto others before they do unto you! But there are, of course, limits," They say, turning serious. "Rule number one is that you are not permitted to sabotage your classmates' studies, be they your rivals or pets. Subtlety is key—you are here to learn cunning and finesse almost as much as raw power. An attempt to enslave one of your classmates, discovered before the attempt is complete will result in your would-be pet being freed and a penalty laid on you, and no, I won't tell you what it is. there are so many possibilities, and even I don't know beforehand which one is going to be most appropriate." Pause. Headtilt. "Also, the library, classrooms, and cafeteria food are absolutely off-limits. Attempting to enslave one of your teachers isn't against the rules, and in fact will result in instant graduation magna cum laude if successful, but you will not be successful, and will no longer be off-limits to them. Don't do it." 

They smirk. "Any questions?" 

"What are the rules about enslaving people other than students or teachers?"

"Excellent question. Surrounding the campus is a 'town' of sorts comprised of neighborhoods transplanted from each of your worlds. The only rule in how you treat the townies is that you are not permitted to bring them on-campus without special dispensation. None of them are as powerful as a teacher, but aside from that, I'll let you figure out the risks involved for yourselves. It'll be an adventure." 
 

"This is a university, right? Is there tutoring available for those with, uh, no prior formal education?" 
 

"Your teachers are aware that this class has been drawn from worlds with widely disparate levels of technology, culture, and educational standards, and their classes are calibrated accordingly. However, if you want to fill in existing gaps in your knowledge, the library contains an excellent selection of volumes on all topics--not just mind control--from every universe here represented and many more besides." 
 

"Are students who arguably possess multiple identities counted per-body or per-identity?" asks the cheerful girl from earlier, now totally lacking any emotional affect whatsoever. 
 

"That's a question that varies by student and by class, but as it happens, for this class, students are counted in the most numerically conservative way possible." She raises a finger. "The most numerically conservative way possible to count the initial class. The number of students is not to decrease. In addition to not obstructing your slaves in their studies, it is forbidden to overwrite their personalities or motivations so much so that it can no longer be meaningfully said that the original student is attending class." 

"Does that mean that killing them is also prohibited?"

"No, we have a highly effective death ward and resurrection facilities, murder away. As long as it's far enough in advance of class time that they'll be recovered by then. So, at least twelve hours, ideally."

"...When you say 'highly effective', does that indicate there's still a chance someone could die permanently?"

"In an infinite multiverse, anything is theoretically possible," they say, "but in practice, it's never happened, and it's been very thoroughly stress-tested by classes with greater reason to test it and innate lethal capacity than this one. Innate capacity is, of course, not the be-all and end-all of capability, but if I find out any of you have deliberately managed to test the death ward to destruction, there will be," a fractional pause, a slightly lifted eyebrow, "Consequences."