"Who could come to the door?"

"I don't think anyone could get to this side of the door but the they could get to the other side of the wall. Anyone in the Weyr could get to the other side of the wall - maybe someone would even have something for getting through stone, maybe it would be worth having a second door to this room - the Weyr is currently inhabited by about four hundred pairs of dragons and riders," which is easy to say as long as he doesn't think about any reason that would be an interesting category and he's just breaking down the census into categories, "and almost four times that many people in the Lower Caverns, including all the children and all the people who maintain the Weyr and take care of the people in it. The closest people will be bathing or using the necessary. Or sleeping in."

"...okay, yeah, I can telepathy people through walls, if you hold the door for me."

"I can hold the door." He will read this book the whole time and try not to think about anything else.

And she casts out looking just for who's around, and broadcasts - Excuse me, Verlan found a door to an interplanar bar and I'm trying to help him but need help to do that. I'm a subtle artist, but I won't read anything not intended for me.

The thing is, this mountain is home to hundreds of telepaths, almost none of them human. They usually don't find it worth the effort to speak to people who have no similar power themselves. They aren't unfriendly, though, at least not most of them; there's some quick coordination about who's going to answer her and then someone asks what she needs while quite a lot of others listen in.

There's a startled yelp from a person (this one is human) who was just about to take a bath and is barely in Bella's range.

- pardon me, Bella says to that one person. To other listeners: I need someone who has the - functional version of whatever was damaged in Verlan, who will let me examine them in some detail, I can avoid specifically flagged things and stop looking at anything irrelevant I come across.

It takes a while for the dragons to collectively figure out who she's talking about. None of them actually know this person by name or face; they all have riders, most of whom also do not know Verlan (and one of whom is now trying to read Bella's mind, though she doesn't really know what she's doing and isn't about to succeed), but once enough riders have been asked K'net recognizes him and reminds Piyanth that they were briefly weyrlings at the same time, and once it's clear that he's dragonless it's obvious what Bella wants is to meet a dragonrider. Most of the riders are busy but there's a green rider who isn't doing anything today because his dragon is badly injured and he's moderately injured; he is very confused when his dragon asks if he would mind being looked at by someone who wants to understand the difference between dragonriders and people who have lost their dragons, but he doesn't mind showing off how cool his dragon is or how much he loves her, if that's... possible somehow...?

The dragon taking point on talking to Bella solemnly informs her that her friend's problem is that he doesn't have a dragon and that it is incurable, but that someone has volunteered to be looked at anyway.

I know I can't bring back his dragon, I'm trying to make it less painful to go on anyway. The phantom pain was pretty easy but the rest of it's dreadfully complicated.

She goes through the informed consent rigmarole with the injured rider.

The injured rider doesn't mind if she sees how he feels about Arith, who is the best dragon and he loves her very much. Does he need to go meet Bella in the Lower Caverns in person or can he keep lying in bed?

He can keep lying in bed.

What does this look like when it's working as intended?

This person - his name is R'til - is an entire human being, with his own feelings and hobbies and friendships. Arith is also an entire person with her own feelings and hobbies and friendships. But they don't have to be. They can fluidly lend each other attention and working memory, or approach problems as one mind that works better than either alone. They're aware of each other's feelings by default, especially if those feelings are very strong, and they can listen to each other's thoughts, though by default they don't. They can drop their separate senses of self and be one person with both sets of memories and both sets of strengths and all their combined intelligence and force of will; they don't do this much because circumstances they have no differences of opinion about are not that common, but they protect this planet from a rain of eel-like hungry monsters that devour all plant and animal life they touch, and when they're doing that they have wholly shared goals and move as one. (Also, it makes for some really good telepathic foursomes with other dragon and rider pairs.)

They have a deeper sense of each other's love than they do of other people's. They complete each other. They find the background awareness of their bond comforting.

Mostly she needs a structural look at this, not the details of what exactly it's all doing - because it's more relevant, not because thinking about what it's all doing makes her deeply uncomfortable. She can see Verlan from here, too, and compare - if she imagines the separateness of Reith having once been there, shaped like Arith's presence in R'til's mind is, and Verlan still having the ability to be his own person, can she tell what would have been joined up to what else, ready to swing open at a touch from his dragon but functional alone -

Yep, they weren't identical but they were pretty similar. There are a lot of things being man-in-the-middled by Arith that are just broken in Verlan.

She places flags, rather than joining up anything right away, she wants to make sure as much as possible is accounted for - this would go over there, that would hook up to two separate things like so... she takes notes, intermittently, makes drawings, though they don't really cover the four-dimensional spaghetti of a whole living mind, just serve to organize her own thoughts about it.

If nobody interrupts her she'll be standing there in the doorway looking at things and placing flags for hours.

She is interrupted at an oddly well-chosen moment, when she's just taking notes and not actively touching Verlan's mind, by a sharp knock at the far side of the Milliways door.

? she says. (Telepaths can do that.)

"When you're done, I'd like a word with you."

She doesn't have to talk aloud but it doesn't make it harder - slightly easier, maybe, to find only what's being said to her. This might take me a really long time and I'll probably have to take at least one break in the middle, but a break where I don't even talk to anyone telepathically, because that uses up the same resource I'd be using to make repairs.

"I want a word when you're done and if that's tomorrow then so be it. Finish with this first, dawn stars know it'd be cruel to make a dragonless man wait if you can help him."

All right.

She continues to find analogous structures and place flags. For hours. It's not that arts-intensive but it is net negative against her recharge rate. Eventually she tells Verlan that he can stop holding the door and then she needs to rest her arts, and then she has more she expects to be able to do for him.

(At some point during all this, probably not affecting Bella through her shields, one of the dragons starts really loudly broadcasting that it's sex time now. This meets with very little surprise or offense.)

Once it's been hours it has also been hours since he slept; he can ask Bar for whatever she has that can put him to sleep and curl up at a booth.

She can put a very effective sleepytime tea on his tab.

Bella convinces Bar to accept her student meal plan, gets dinner, and naps on the other bench in the same booth.