"Thank you. We choose people to train in our art who are diligent, steady, impartial and of sound mind. Some of that is because of the knowledge they must collect, and the integrity with which they must preserve it. Some of that is because the rumors about the side-effects of ideomotorism are not entirely baseless."

His voice is gentle and schoolmasterly.

"Tamett, you will have been recording on the path up here, won't you? Would you please read out your notes on the view of the sea?" 

"Er..." The fresh-faced scrivener flicks back a couple of pages and reads aloud. "- sky clear, sea surface rough, sun glinting off waves, two large three-masted ships and three steamboats approaching Meridian, four steamboats departing, four long-necked sea creatures with colorful translucent flesh on the horizon avoiding the shipping lanes, high fluffy clouds moving in from south-east -"

He stops. "There weren't any sea creatures out there that I saw. That I remember seeing." 

They would have been notable to Lemrae too, were they visible. The largest animals known to science are whales, and even those would be hard to spot at such great distance.

"I should give you a pamphlet on how we record weather phenomena before you go, to save you some ink," the wizened chronicler says as an affable aside to Tamett.

"Ideomotorism trains us to record what we observe, as we observe it, before the stage of conscious reflection. This has many merits, preventing self-interested biases by putting ink to paper without the involvement of the self. However, that also means that idle figments of the imagination can sometimes intrude unawares, that would otherwise be rejected."

"Your sea creatures and wire locusts are no more real than a stick figure drawn in the margin of a schoolboy's workbook, or the little man one imagines running along the scenery when looking out the window of a moving train. All ideomotorists are taught to ignore these flights of fancy, to leave them out of the notes copied out longhand for others to read."

"Partly that is professional. Partly it is pragmatic. In the past, some chroniclers have developed fixations on the fantastical wildlife that appears in their shorthand. They privilege these imaginings with a response, try and trick their eyes into seeing the creatures their notes describe or collect clues of their existence. In doing so, they make the monsters more real, but only to their own minds."

"They deny themselves sleep or drug themselves in pursuit of the figments, flinching at shadows and convincing themselves they are being stalked. Ultimately they scare themselves to death, or expose themselves to ordinary wild animals that they hallucinate to be more exotic but are no less dangerous, or rend their own flesh in imitation of their imaginings. I have here a few records from the archives of those sad cases, most in the victims' own hands."

He sets out some more scrolls, two of them bearing old bloodstains, all with the same archival ribbons tied around them. 

"Stable, reasonable ideomotorists ignore the imagined beings and are perfectly safe," the chronicler says, his practised lecture shifting to a mild tone of rebuke. "We keep this quiet to avoid sensationalizing the condition, driving more to suffer from it. I would urge you to put these things from your mind and avoid provoking any public panic."

To Tamett, he adds, "If you can refrain from the temptation to read your notes immediately as you write them, that is often the simplest solution."

Tamett has heard all this before. By the end of it, he's fidgeting, holding himself back from speaking up out of turn.