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I know everyone wanted a thread where Leareth fixed all of the Survivorverse's problems, but this is not that thread.
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There were attempts to trace the chain of causation, later, to reconstruct the series of events - after the Atlantic Six had arrived, after the Royal Court had escaped, after they had sworn vengeance and the superheroes of Detroit had expressed total confusion, after the forensics experts surveyed every inch of the cordoned-off battlefield, to the smoking spot on the ground where the Titanium Tyrant had stood. No one, hero or villain, could remember acting in any respect uncharacteristically; nothing, step-by-step, anomalous had occurred, except - 

Well.

The chain of events was this. At 0407, the Titanium Tyrant, four members of the Royal Court (Heavyhand, Blitz, Paragon and the Gorgon Queen), and three previously unassociated supervillains (Steelstorm, Earthshaker and Proteus) had, by use of a robot army, seized control of twenty-three blocks of Winchester, MI surrounding a police station, for purposes of breaking out three supervillains then in jail pending transfer to a high-security prison (Spinner, Chasseur, and Polymath). At 04:11, the Detroit Defenders (Radiant, Vigil, Mayhem and the Chrome Champion) were alerted, and from 04:17 on, they intervened to attempt to stop this breakout, as would arrive Octavian, Charioteer and the Atlantic Six, who would arrive later in the battle.

By 0418, the police station was on fire. By 0423, it had spread to four of the twenty-three secured blocks, the smoke blocking visibility for Steelstorm's robots, thus minimizing casualties, while simultaneously providing an escape path for the Tyrant. At 04:27, the Royal Court attempted to withdraw in a prearranged pattern to the basement of a nearby museum. This movement was not traced until (0923). At 0431, Radiant, quote, got turned around, close quote, then quote found herself close quote facing the Titanium Tyrant (wearing his Durendal Mk. VII heavy battle armor) in a room displaying knightly armor of the thirteenth centuries.

At 04:33,  -

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Leareth is testing an experimental Gate-technique. The idea is that if he routes the Gate through several additional planes, this could make it less detectable to various types of wards, or let him Gate in to a location behind any known type of shield. Trials one through 37 either didn't work at all, or ended up working exactly like a normal Gate to his destination records-cache. But Leareth is well-rested, ready to handle a bizarre accidental Gate-malfunction if necessary. 

On trial number 38, the Gate goes up. It doesn't feel normal, though, and the threshold is milky and opaque. He can't see what's on the other side. But the power-drain is acceptable - he's doing it from a permanent Gate-threshold, concealed deep underground in one of his northern records-caches - and Leareth is wearing five different shield-talismans against various types of physical, magical, or other-Gift-related attacks. 

He steps across. 

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- into a place that isn't his records cache at all!

And also right into some kind of obstacle, which he didn't have enough warning to make any observations about before running into it facefirst. 

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The obstacle is a set of shelves with tags and broken glass display cases, one of them containing an odd-looking helmet on it, reading as magical to his mage-sight! The helmet jiggles, turns, and falls - 

- he might be able to dodge it but what is either a REALLY HUGE MAN in armor or a man in REALLY HUGE ARMOR has just been practically fired at him by a flying (!) magic (!) girl in a white costume and cape -

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Leareth's combat reflexes are very good, but only to a certain extent, and usually he can rely on having any idea what to prepare for.

Which is not the case right now! Leareth's immediate instinct is to start preparing a Gate back, which should usually take a fraction of a second, but his first attempt doesn't work...

There's no time to reason through what or how or why. He instinctively remembers the routing-path he was trialing, which planes in what order, and reverses it, sends out the searching tendrils of magic -

The odd magical helmet-object with its mysterious magical signature seems less immediately threatening than the huge man in armor, though Leareth isn't that worried about either (there's no time to be actually worried) - but he's well shielded, nothing is actually likely to injure him, and the falling helmet isn't that powerfully magic but enough physical force might disrupt the Gate, so he braces himself against that first - 

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The helmet lands on his head!

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- less than ideal, but Leareth doesn't actually have time to think about it or analyze the very odd rippling magical effects, because the Gate-threshold (laid horizontally on the floor, right under him) is complete, and his search-spell is reaching and reaching, taking all of his concentration, and - 

there

And the Gate snaps up and he starts to fall. 

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And the heavily armored man - twists and turns as he tries not to crash - slams into his mage-barrier. (The heavily armored man appears to have a non-magical mage-barrier covering his armor, weapons built into his shoulders that fire deadly beams of invisible burning light, a very impressive-looking polearm, and diamond-tipped armor-piercing blades built into his gauntlets, incidentally.)

So they can both go through the gate!

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They fall and then gravity flips and they're flying sideways, and crashing to the stone floor in a tangle of limbs and armor, in the process setting off several nearby alarms. (Leareth has the Gate-threshold set to detect the momentum of anything crossing it and trigger an alarm above a certain threshold, on the assumption that any Gate he's falling through is an emergency one. There are also wards to detect unfamiliar people not keyed to the Gate-network, which the stranger isn't.) 

Leareth, bruised and thoroughly winded from the impact of a fully armored man falling on top of him, but not actually injured thanks to his physical shields, shoves the stranger away from himself with a mage-barrier. He scrambles up on his heels, and then - stops. Something feels wrong - in his head, in his thoughts - and he can't quite put his finger on it - 

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Nayoki reaches the Gate-room at a sprint less than fifteen seconds later. Sees the unfamiliar man in inexplicably massive armor, and Leareth in a crouch, looking dizzy and shaken and not actually interacting with her. 

She flings a paralysis-spell at the stranger, the simple force-net kind, and then a shield over Leareth, and then Broadsends a Mindspeech call to everyone within range, :- emergency unknown threat need backup here -: 

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The Durendal Mk. VII is designed to deliver sufficient force to let the Tyrant kill high-end bricks barehanded, so the force-net grabs ahold of the armor and wraps around it and then shatters as the Tyrant flexes - his poleaxe is on the floor but he doesn't need it, his shoulder-mounted lasers are tracking both of them and ready to fire as he rises -

"Have we met?" he says, in English. Trying to orient - where is he, where is this, what is this -

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That is VERY ALARMING! People shouldn't be able to do that without even using magic!!! 

Nayoki doesn't recognize the language he's speaking, but she's already reacting. Set-commanding someone first and asking questions later is definitely escalatory, but Nayoki really doesn't feel that she was the one to escalate this first

:DONOTMOVE: she flings at the massive armored man, and then tries to read him with Thoughtsensing. 

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Leareth is still too busy catching his breath to have very many thoughts, but he instinctively starts gathering a levinbolt in the the first tenth of a second after the man shatters Nayoki's paralysis-net, and then...stops...notices his mind catching on an odd sort of flinch. 

- and then Nayoki beats him to it, and for some reason that he doesn't understand at all, Leareth hates this. It's not that it seems unstrategic, exactly, it seems - violating? An intense feeling of badwrongdon't surges up from some place deep inside him, and it's - it feels right, but he can recognize that it's not, this isn't a reaction he's ever had before... 

His reflex is to check himself for compulsions, which he does, and there aren't any, but the bizarre magical helmet is still there, still...doing something...and he tries to wrench it off. 

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The Titanium Tyrant, in his armor, is immune to heat, electricity, radiation, and kinetic energy up to pretty ridiculous levels, but he has no resistance whatsoever to Mindhealing. He freezes.

The bizarre magical helmet is bizarrely hard to remove, considering how easily it got on! It is completely unwilling to come off, at least not to a wrench.

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This is really very alarming! Leareth is not normally prone to panicking about unexpected and alarming situations, but he's getting close to it now. 

He tries again, this time with magic, and fails again, and is tempted to try to melt it off but this seems like a very bad idea to do himself. 

:Nayoki: he sends, because he's still having some trouble actually talking. :Something is wrong: 

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As many as several things are wrong! Nayoki had not failed to notice this! Though she's additionally unhappy at the level of distress in Leareth's mindvoice. He doesn't normally leak that much. 

...Also that's a magical artifact on his head, and he seems upset at his failed attempt to remove it, which implies he didn't bring it back with him on purpose - and she doesn't recognize the magical signature at all...

:Just - hold still: she sends. :We will figure it out: With a burst of Mindspeech, she directs one of the arriving mage-guards to summon some Healers to them as well. 

And she re-focuses on the man, now immobilized and - hopefully - harmless, though she's not taking anything for granted. But despite his impossible armor, he shows no sign of being Gifted, and isn't shielding his mind in the least. 

What's he thinking right now? 

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He is thinking that he has no idea what just occurred, but in the sense of - having a very large number of hypotheses all of which he formally put almost no weight on, which he is now rapidly updating, weights changing in his mind as he observes the situation -

The first and most likely is that someone with an unknown power to induce hallucinations successfully trapped him in a hallucinatory dreamworld, in which case he is going to have some trouble getting out - He's looking for inconsistencies, places where physical law fails to match his understanding of it, discontinuities, places where his thoughts or the thoughts of a hypothetical other unlawfully shape reality -

- The second is that an unknown group just kidnapped him; he does not seem to be surprised in the slightest that some group would attempt to kidnap him, except the he thought he knew everyone who might try and this doesn't match up to the likely style of any of them, though everything he sees he's comparing to the preferred modes of operations of dozens of different groups and so an unknown is most likely -

- The third is that he hit his head very hard and is ordinarily hallucinating but ordinary hallucinations from being knocked out are less consistent than this and he's downgrading the possibility by the second -

And they go on and on, and while he's doing this he's watching everything, calculating what they think and what they'll do and making instinctive predictions of their instinctive motion that are tremendously inaccurate but becoming less so by the second -

(In some respects he is noticeably less intelligent than, say, Leareth; in others he is completely outside the realm of anyone she has ever met, to an extent that suggests he may not be human after all.)

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Nayoki now has twice as many questions as she did before! It's not just that she has nothing closer to an explanation of how the man ended up here, because apparently he has no idea, but she doesn't recognize anything from his thoughts. Not place-names or even countries, nothing about any of the mysteriously powerful groups who are for some reason his enemies - no spells, no Gifts at all, he seems to be modeling this as a situation entirely without magic... 

And his thoughts are bizarre. She's seen gryphon and kyree minds before, and this is substantially more alien. Enough that her next instinct is to turn her Mindhealing Sight on him as well. 

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The Healers would really like Leareth out of this room, since it really seems like the most dangerous place to be in the facility right now, but he's refusing for some reason? They're pretty worried about this as well! Fortunately he doesn't seem to be badly injured - and doesn't have a head injury, which was their first thought for 'Leareth is behaving oddly', but it could be something else. 

A quartet of mages form ranks around him and raise the most powerful shields they can manage. 

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(Leareth is still having a bafflingly hard time - not with thinking, exactly, but with prioritizing. His thoughts keep bouncing away down unexpected paths - he's worried that the armored stranger will feel threatened, he's desperately curious, he's still kind of furious with Nayoki about the set-command but not, actually, managing to come up with an argument that he expects her to listen to.) 

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Mindhealing Sight first. And while she looks, Nayoki is going to try some other languages as well - Rethwellani, Valdemaran, and she can manage a few broken words in the tongue of the Eastern Empire.  

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The Tyrant understands none of these languages In the slightest! As he has not formed the intuition that mind reading is possible, all of his thinking is taking place in one language or else subverbally!

His mind is... complicated. It's like there are two separate things going on in it, to a much sharper degree than anyone else's. On the outside, there's a frankly palatial cake, somehow still iced in the oven; the sort of thing that a craftsman made with immense skill and effort - not uniquely tasty, necessarily, but made with more precise craftsmanship than anyone can normally master, any blemishes concealed with additional frosting -

- and on the inside there's far more space than there humanly ought to be, almost like the Gift for Mindhealing Sight; a constant flow of chemical reactions to the outside, burbling frantically and yet somehow doing exactly the right processing so that the towers of his mind rise and fall precisely as they ought, each moment an equally delicious meal as everything stays in an unnatural balance. 

It's... like Leareth, in some respects; the instinctive and procedural mind supercharged, the rational mind merely that of an ordinary very intelligent person, except the balance is different and it is - bizarrely overcharged in some respects, not at all in others. There's none of the engineering that Leareth's done; the outer mind feeds requests to the inner mind and acts on the information it provides, but he hasn't so much rebuilt himself as been built by himself.

(She can tell, though, reading his mind, that he is from a world with very different magic, not with no magic; some of the ideas in his head match almost to compulsions or Firestarting, except viewed from a different angle and categorized completely differently.)

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Which is its own flavor of concerning, probably, but most of all Nayoki is fascinated. She wants to bounce her Sight to Leareth immediately and get his input. She's tempted to check for Gift-channels, because that really does look like a Gift - closer to her own Mindhealing Gift than to any other she knows, but not really like anything she's seen in Velgarth before. 

It's beautiful.

...And figuring it out isn't her first priority. She's incredibly confused by how he's thinking about magic, and she's starting to suspect that Leareth won't have any more answers for her. 

:Leareth: she sends, urgently. :What happened? Is it safe to speak with him -?: 

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Leareth gives her a look that...doesn't fit, somehow, there's something off about his expression. 

:Please do. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I - interrupted him in a fight:

Which he feels BAD about, bizarrely, and this leaks through a little as he widens the Mindspeech link and bounces her his recollection of that brief glimpse. A girl, flying, radiating magic, dressed all in white, but not in the style of a Herald, and not using any familiar kind of spell. 

:- I would owe him an apology, except that it may be in his interest to have gotten out of the situation, it seemed - unfortunate: 

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:...He is assuming that we kidnapped him. Apparently he has many enemies. Where did you find him, I am assuming your destination was not as intended?: 

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Shrug. :Somewhere very foreign. Another world, possibly, I cannot think of anywhere in Velgarth that matches it, and maybe there are other material planes on the opposite side of the elemental ones: 

He hopes he can replicate the routing, because it's clearly a world with a lot of problems – huh, and that line of thought flags his attention just in its strangeness, when really what matters is the potential resources - except it doesn't feel like that's the thing that matters... 

:Can you please clarify his intentions so you can remove the set-command: he sends. :It is a rather hostile footing to start on: 

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