Sigh. :Do you want us to keep you asleep until we figure out how to reverse this?: 

Leareth shakes his head, almost violently. :I need to - I need to think. To - figure out how to fix this -: 

:That is really not what you need to do! Leareth, there is something wrong with you. If you were physically injured from a magical attack of some kind, you would think it was correct to rest and recover, right? This is no different: 

Leareth just shakes his head. 

(He wants to talk to Vanyel. But, of course, Vanyel has no reason to want to talk to him. He called the Herald a friend, and yet never hesitated to hurt him or his country, and that's not something he can just shove into the past, it shouldn't be forgivable, certainly not so easily...) 

She's so worried!!!! This is substantially worse than she thought, it's not just that his judgement is subtly off, he's deteriorating, and she has no idea how to fix it. 

:Leareth, I am going to look with my Sight to try to figure out what happened and whether I can help: she sends, very softly. :Just - try to think about something innocuous? If this the sort of spell that feeds on itself then I want to minimize how much damage it causes before we can reverse it. All right?: 

No answer. 

Nayoki sighs, and opens her Mindhealing Sight fully. 

:...Shields down, please?: 

At least he cooperates that much. 

Emril is going to spend the next half-candlemark at least examining the Titanium Tyrant with her Sight. (Not that she knows his name.) It's easy to establish that he isn't sick, and that he has an approximately normal quantity of harmless skin and mouth and gut flora, but it takes a lot more staring to figure out if they're substantially different from the ones that people in Velgarth carry around, and thus potentially dangerous to the locals. 

A few minutes in, someone reaches out with Mindspeech from another room. :My name is Senjas. I am one of Leareth's mage-scholars - I am supposed to ask you questions about mind-affecting magic in your world, and trade with answers to your questions?: 

:I am Sandor:. It is actually his name. :Yes, certainly:.

And he is happy to exchange information about mind-affecting magic! Any specific questions to start off with?

(And he will in exchange inhale information as fast as Senjas can provide it, building it into a structure of understanding, asking questions both about magic and about anything else about Velgarth he can manage.)

Senjas doesn't have a very clear sense of what questions to ask, so he's actually going to start by explaining some of Velgarth's mind-affecting magic in more detail, so that Sandor can compare and contrast! 

They've been over Gifts like Empathy and Bardic, of course, but those don't have enduring effects. Compulsions, on the other hand, do. You can do very fine-detail work with compulsions; it's limited only by the mage's skill. Compulsions can be done either on actions (most often banning actions, but you can force actions as well), or on a higher level, on a person's sense of their goals and wants. The second kind is much more challenging but, when pulled off well - and when the content isn't too out of character - can be almost impossible to notice from the inside. Compulsions can even ban or require thoughts, though it takes an absurdly high skill level to do this usefully, and even then it has significant and sometimes very unexpected impairing side effects. Their organization uses voluntary action-ban compulsions against things like leaking project secrets or sabotaging infrastructure. They mostly don't use the other kinds as a matter of course; it's included in the protocols for keeping very powerful hostile mages prisoner, but really that's a bad idea anyway, it's very hard to make them totally loophole-free. 

You can do conditional compulsions that sit silently for months, even years, and kick in with a very specific trigger. You can, to a limited extent, affect attentional patterns with compulsions. He knows some colleagues who do it on themselves for sustained-focus work.

(Leareth. The only person he knows who does it casually is Leareth, generally when he was testing a process for the - project - and it required him to work for thirty-six candlemarks straight or something equally ridiculous.) 

You can in some limited situations give people skills with compulsions, if the instructor is a mage, has the relevant control, and understands the skill on a very, very detailed mechanical level. It's faster, but much, much higher overhead, so worth it only for very specialized training – or for basic training where speed and instructor time are at a paramount, so it's actually quite useful for incorporating green recruits into an army unit. 

Compulsions aren't very good at compelling emotions. There are some common downstream effects – involuntary compulsions tend to cause fear and revulsion – but you can't really compel fear directly, for that you want Empathy or Bardic, which don't stick. It's pretty much impossible to comprehensively revamp someone's personality, though you can sometimes work around things like shyness or stage fright via strategic use of action-compulsions. (Also sometimes useful in a training scenario!) You can make someone feel a sense of wanting to do something they wouldn't normally do, but you can't make it feel natural to them, at least not consistently. It's almost impossible to lay a compulsion that blocks noticing the compulsion's effects; to do them sneakily, the only strategy is subtlety, and not pushing it past the bounds of plausibility. 

(Some of these things are less true for Mindhealing, but even Mindhealing can't compel emotions very well; Mindhealers would have a much easier time treating patients, if it could. He doesn't bring it up.)  

Similarities and differences? 

The problem with all of this is that his world's magic does not particularly work by rules. Every practitioner has, as Valdemar would call it, a unique Gift, and while there are some elements and restrictions common to all of them - No known Gift has permitted time travel or travel faster than the speed of light - each seems to work along fundamentally different lines, such that any attempt to claim that "superpowers work this way," you can always find a counterexample.

The two most well-known mental effects are, first, one (which, he does not say, belongs to his wife) which can directly compel action or inaction, directly puppeting someone to do exactly as you want; the restriction is that it can only affect one person at a time, and the user needs to directly look into the target's eyes... (All true.)

... And a second which belongs to a person who is infinitely persuasive within range of his voice, who can convert you to his philosophy by talking to you and thereby cause you to give up whatever you previously believed in in exchange for being his servant. (Contained within his thoughts are the fact that this person is not a threat at present due to threats to destroy the city he is in with unthinkably powerful weapons, clearly more potent than a Final Strike, if he ever tries to leave it, and that his philosophy focuses on service to his god, who probably doesn't exist.)

But there are others; creatures with a hypnotic gaze, one man has a supernatural aura of dread that causes everyone who tries to oppose him to quake in fear, someone else has the power to paralyze everyone within a mile selectively (though that may be physical instead of mental), another can make you vague and drifty and suggestible and inclined to trust whatever she says... (He does not mention the existence of another super, who is also a minion converter who works by voice, but has a variety of other weird powers as well and who he is not wholly certain it is safe to even think about by name, but this person comes up briefly in his thoughts.)

Adding the restriction that the source of it is the helmet, it becomes even harder; he knows of literally one person in the history of his species who could craft objects with supernatural powers that affect minds, and he is extremely limited in what he can do to those who don't consent. It is possible there are others - there's a long history to the world - but he finds it unlikely. (Magister, the person is Magister, and he buys souls to have them tormented forever which almost certainly don't exist unless they start existing just so Magister can be responsible for their torture.)

Also, at some point when it's practical he'd appreciate a stop home, but he understands they're in crisis right now.

Senjas, in another room, can easily write down everything that Sandor says and thinks without making it obvious. The man's wife sounds rather interesting. Senjas sort of wishes he could admit to the mindreading - and was cleared to talk about anything sensitive, and not bound by a compulsion to avoid it - so he could brag about his own wife, who works on god-alignment theory and who is, in his own opinion at least, very very wonderful. 

He writes down the existence of the possibly-hazardous-to-know-about person with a mind-controlling voice. He's intrigued by their world's apparent ability to coordinate on a deterrence policy with the infinitely persuasive superpowered person. Again, none of that was shared explicitly, so he can't ask about it. 

He's curious what the options are for countering a mind-affecting superpower, assuming that the person responsible is no longer available or isn't willing to undo it; in Velgarth, any mage can undo another mage's work, and mage-sight can directly see compulsions on someone's mind, if the mage looking has the required skill and knows to check. He also wants to know about mind-affecting artifacts. Putting a compulsion set-spell on a talisman or something probably isn't impossible, in Velgarth terms, but he's never heard of it being done before. Artifacts are mostly used for shielding, which can block compulsions from being laid; is there an equivalent to that in his world? 

There is not! Each power has its own rules for resisting it; broadly speaking there's a difference between powers it is literally impossible to resist and powers which it is merely very hard to resist, but every single power works differently from every other power and there is no generalized power resistance ability. The first ability lasts until the user removes it, period, and the only rule is 'don't get hit', and the second lasts forever without limitation. Known categories are 'user removes at will, removed when the user stops paying attention, decays once away from the user, stops abruptly when away from the user, and decay after application', but that's five categories for not much more than five examples.

And this is probably the first mind affecting artifact the Tyrant has ever encountered, so at this point they probably know more than he does about it.

...He notes all of that down, although it's not as helpful as he might have hoped. 

:It sounds like there's a good chance we won't be able to resolve this with the resources we have here: he says finally. :Unless we get lucky, and it's an effect that decays with time. But it seems like we might have to figure out how to get back to your world – which we obviously want to do anyway in the long run, it sounds like there's a lot of potential for collaboration. Do you...have any advice on managing that? Who are the leaders in your world, who's a good idea to approach?: 

Unfortunately, the leaders are by and large not on his side!

(Anyone with mindhealing sight would notice that his mind is shifting; outer forces asking subverbally for a true summary of his beliefs and then the crenellated cake shifting to a completely different pattern of towers in response to the rapid flow of inner information - Thoughtsensing will have a good deal of trouble with it, since it's not as though any of his beliefs or thoughts that he was actually thinking are actually changing)

:The essential problem with this is that the leadership is by and large incompetent,: this, he thinks, is true, it is why he is not on their side. :My world is divided into a large number of feuding nations until recently loosely organized into two factions which avoided war through pointing humanity-destroying weapons at each other on hair triggers, one of which factions recently collapsed, with the result that there is presently a good deal of international chaos and some risk of medium-scale apocalypse;: by medium-scale he means that humanity will survive but civilization may not. :The governments I have most experience with are bureaucratic, corrupt, and largely incompetent at anything other than threatening apocalypses, with individuals facing extreme difficulty accomplishing anything through legal means: He is thinking about - walls of stone-faced bureaucrats denying you permits, "I'm sorry that's just not allowed," the number of brilliant tinkers (a type of magic or of engineering? ambiguous) who gave up and became supervillains (people working outside the system illegally to achieve their ends, is the best translation, but it's a whole concept) because they couldn't figure out how to navigate the system, about the inability to speak with anyone who can make decisions and isn't simply the mouthpiece of a dead stone machine - people putting on masks because they can't get anything else done, the early heroes who were vigilantes because the police were the criminals they needed to stop, and nothing's gotten better since then -

:I am the head of a small but recently expanding faction - perhaps four to six percent of planetary armed power?: Most of which is [not thinking about that] - :We desire to fix some of these difficulties and are therefore at odds with existing governments and those factions who support them. Our recent plan, which we expect we may want to scrap now that we know your world exists, was to ally with a number of related factions take over a small and largely uninhabited island as a secure base of operations for developments in more effective administrative systems, interplanetary exploration, and defenses against superweapons, and to serve as a refuge for those who desired to escape the system-as-it-exists: And he is just not thinking about the tactics he means to use this. :So you are presently speaking with one of the leaders in my world, though not one with any particular diplomatic influence with the rest:.

....Wow that's depressing and awful. Velgarth is also depressing and awful, of course, but it's a different flavor of awfulness? Even the Eastern Empire - the birthplace of Senjas' parents - doesn't make it impossible to get permits. Surely that's just stupid and doesn't serve anyone's goals?

He gets down as much of that as he can in his notes, including the unspoken thoughts. 

:- Noted: he sends, once Sandor is finished. :You seem straightforward to work with, so - well, this isn't actually my call, but I expect we'd be happy to mostly work with you as our liaison to your world. And it's possible we can offer you a secure base of operations, in exchange for your people's help with some of our problems. We - have our own difficulties with that - but Leareth has invested a lot in building our facilities here in the north, where the gods can't interfere so much: 

(He's now sort of musing on the analogy between "walls of stone-faced bureaucrats denying you permits" and the Velgarth gods. It's maybe a silly comparison, but something about it feels sort of apt?) 

:Anyway. You'll definitely need to talk to some other people who, well, specialize more in navigating politics, it's really not my field. But it sounds like it would work out well for both of us, if we were able to get in contact with your faction specifically?: 

He would obviously want that a lot! He's been out of contact with his children team for way too long at this point, assuming all this is real.

:I would be extremely pleased if this could be managed; I greatly desire to cooperate in our mutual interests, and obtaining a secure base of facilities is one of my major long-term goals. I'd also be interested in trading technological assistance for magical, artifacts for engineering help setting up an industrial base: This entire term 'industrial base' encodes all sorts of complicated concepts - enormous facilities with complicated machinery for digging up resources from the ground and processing it into finished goods, machines on machines on machines, turning raw dirt into steel -

(And, of course, the Tyrant would very much like to get his hands on Compulsion-blocking artifacts, since it sounds like one mage might be able to shut down the Royal Court and he hates whoever-fires-first-wins situations, even if you trust people it's hard to relax.)

Senjas notes all of this down. He really wants to ask more about the 'industrial base' part, but that's not the top priority right now. He likes Sandor - the man is obviously brilliant, that much comes across to Thoughtsensing, and really that's the main thing that makes Senjas fond of someone. He (correctly) doesn't actually have the authority to make plans or promises with their visitor from another world. 

:That makes sense so far: he says. :I need to go discuss with my colleagues now. ...Sorry, I wish we could give you a better welcome, but it's hard with the possible disease-contagion, and Leareth being out of commission at the moment. Do you need - paper for taking notes, or anything else?: 

:I have the required equipment on me, but thank you:, he says.

It turns out that Nayoki apparently isn't ready to meet anyway, so Senjas is going to lurk for a few minutes and keep reading their visitor's mind. Emril, the Healer, is still there, having not yet finished her survey. 

Meanwhile, Nayoki is staring at Leareth's mind. 

She's quite familiar with the way that Leareth's mind looks to her, normally: on the surface, he's unusually - square, tidy almost geometrical, not at all like the normal curves and roundness of most people's surfaces. And his surface is intricate, full of complex patterns - both shallow explicit patterns, like bread baked in a stenciled pan, and also deeper, slightly more organic and fundamental patterns, like those fancy braided breads from Acabarrin (except for Leareth, of course, the intricacy goes far beyond what's physically possible for actual bread.) And his central core is simple, too. To her Sight, it's - dense, solid and immutable, like a bread with filling except the filling is a perfect ball of unnaturally heavy metal, dragging everything else in its wake. It's not that he doesn't have any of the usual messiness, but for him it's - contained, routed around, boxed into the middle depths of his mind and not at all salient unless she's looking for it specifically. The linkages from his core motivations to his surface mind are deliberate, carefully twisted and braided and imprinted, and - unusually straight, efficient, pushing the messy parts aside rather than accommodating them. 

Nayoki can tell that she's still looking at Leareth, if only because that unusually solid core hasn't changed, but everything else is alarmingly different. 

Leareth is trying very hard to - well, to cope. Usually his first step, in a situation like this, would be to orient, he's just received quite a lot of new relevant information, but he's not even getting to that stage, yet, because half of his thoughts or observations lead into spirals of horror and grief. 

It didn't help when Nayoki pointed out that he's under mind-affecting magic, even though she's clearly right, because - why?

...Because the emotions aren't spurious, aren't random, they're at least directionally the same as the way he's always felt. He knew all along that his immortality method is horrifying and awful, he just - what - he decided on purpose to stop caring? 

(doesn't feel quite right, but–) 

It seems like the change is in the - relative weighting? In the past, he didn't dwell on the horribleness of his immortality method, because - it was a fixed cost? One he paid once per lifetime, and he was paying more attention to what he could accomplish with that additional life?

...At the start, he did the actual numerical calculations for it – he's pretty sure he did, it's enough lifetimes ago now that he has no intrinsic memory and only re-memorized records, and of course he's not sure how far to trust his recall right now - 

- but it suddenly feels very very salient that he did those calculations once, or at most a few times, and then stopped. That he's spent the last dozen lifetimes taking it for granted, that he deserves to exist more than the children whose bodies he steals–

Which should be informative about the change in his internal priorities, but it takes a lot of willpower to focus on that, instead of on how much it hurts. 

(And that is also, itself, informative about whatever just changed in his internal priorities....) 

That was an entire minute of dwelling on how everything hurts, he can put that aside for now.

(Right? .....Right????) 

- putting that aside for now, sort of. 

His emotions about making tradeoffs are a lot more salient? No, that feels incomplete. It's some subset of emotions and some subset of tradeoffs and he doesn't see the pattern, yet - it's not just negative emotions... 

He really wishes that mind-affecting magical artifacts from other worlds came with better documentation