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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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Leareth nods, only a little shakily. :I think we need significantly more context before we can safely make contact with your world. It sounds complicated. But we would want to anyway, it - there is so much potential for collaboration. And I heard a quick summary of what you explained to Senjas. It sounds as though your world could also use help: 

He's trying very hard to focus on that; it feels so important, and for once, he thinks it would also have seemed high-priority to him before...this...happened to him. Though he thinks it would have felt less like a punch to the gut. 

It's hard to stay focused on the future and the upsides, though. Right now, he keeps having the overwhelming feeling that Sandor shouldn't trust him, he's proven himself by his track record to be fundamentally not the sort of person who good people want to work with - and it feels intolerable that he's lying, implicitly, by not explaining what sorts of things he's done. He's the only person in the world who could have cast that Gate, and he's also the only person in the world who steals children's bodies to wear for himself, and great now he's feeling physically nauseated again - 

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One difference, between himself and Leareth, is that "helping his world" is not actually a moral imperative to him. He wants his world to stop picking fights with him and to let the people he cares about go live somewhere else; he certainly would prefer for it to be better administered, he prefers people not starving to people starving and happy lives to sad, but he is in fact capable of walking away, and the reason he does not want to is because until someone fixes his world - which does, he suspects, mean 'takes over' in the long term - it will continue throwing out potential apocalypses that will catch him in the blast radius.

:The essential difficulty of helping my world is that there are major power bases supporting most of the nations presently in existence, who would object to any attempt to interfere with them, and many are quite good at their jobs. But I agree, there is extensive potential for collaboration; many things you can do with your mage-work seem totally beyond us, while we have a number of technical advances that we could share to help advance your world:.

And he's hoping that focusing on the object level will help Leareth, but he really doesn't know how to help Leareth - he's had realizations he was wrong before, but the last major one he had Thei to help with, and he really doesn't think Leareth is missing the realization that he actually is more competent than most of the people he's talking to.

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Leareth absorbs this, and then has to hold very still for thirty seconds and focus all of his attention on not crying.

:I was - thinking - maybe a path to figuring out what happened to me would be - guessing which factions of your world might - have this effect as a goal?:

His hands are shaking again. It doesn’t feel worth trying to hide it; it’s probably obvious anyway how upset he is.

:I am still trying to make sense of what is happening to me, but it - I can imagine - someone might want to induce this effect if - they thought someone was too willing to hurt people to achieve their goals. Even goals where - the intended outcome - is to benefit more people. I am - feeling very overwhelmed and distressed when I think about plans I carried out that hurt innocent people, and - it is not that the intended effects feel less important, but it seems to be affecting my time sense, it - feels very bad to pay costs now for expected benefit in the future, it feels like - the math cannot work out, that some things cannot be justified - which I thought before, I think, but differently and - different things -:

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:That... is extremely difficult: No one believes in the existence of parallel fantasy worlds, barring a few weak Idealists; Magister, he supposes, but not these ones, and while Magister is near the top of his suspect list, he is very, very far below the leading candidate, Unknown New Super - nothing about this is at all his style. :No faction I am aware of knows you exist:

But subtract Leareth, and everything makes sense. There's a super with ethics-altering powers, and he is the obvious choice for a first target - 'making people good' is a possible power because of the Messiah of Mozambique -

- The Messiah's power is irreversible - other powers work differently -

:I wonder if your gods may have sent you into an attack aimed at me. I am also ruthless, for my own goals:

And the Six might or might not agree to this, but there are a great many independent superheroes who would.

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Six different people are still listening to his thoughts, bouncing their confusion back and forth as they try to get down every possible fragment of relevant information. 'Idealists' are...a type of superpower, maybe, rather than a specific individual? Maybe a political faction? The Magister is a specific person, it seems, and one of Sandor's top named suspects, but he still thinks the most likely culprit is someone else, someone he didn't see coming. Powers that alter someone's fundamental ethics and priorities are a thing, that's terrifying. There's, again, a specific known individual, called by a title that has - some sort of deep cultural significance, but they're not really mapping it over onto anything they recognize - and associated with a specific country. 

His powers are irreversible, which is significantly more terrifying. Priority #1 is to find out whether "irreversible" powers can be approximately-reversed if someone with a similar power alters the affected person back to their previous state - you wouldn't want to try this with anyone other than Leareth, but he documents his ethics and reasoning process, it should be possible to put together a detailed enough portfolio...

The Six are...leaders, but not governments? Superpowered individuals, probably, but that's a guess. 

Someone bounces the bit about the 'Messiah of Mozambique' to Nayoki, so she can decide what she wants to do with that information. 

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...Nothing, for the moment, Leareth seems capable of engaging and she's going to let him lead things for now. She's not very worried about Sandor's reaction if they reveal they've been reading his mind - of course they're reading his mind - but she's actually kind of nervous about whether Leareth will be angry or something. 

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Leareth nods. 

(He is mostly managing to engage at all by pretending that he's speaking on behalf of someone else, like Nayoki, trying to accurately represent the goals of an organization that he is not explicitly thinking of as his.) 

:...I could see that. I– it could obviously be very costly for Velgarth, but I think it may be less so than if the attack was in fact intended for you, and affected you. Velgarth has many problems, but they are not urgent, aside from the fact that people are dying every day - but they have been dying every day for two thousand years - technically much longer than that, I suppose...: 

He had more things to say but now he can't because he's crying, perfect, this is exactly what this conversation needs. 

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Nayoki flinches.

:- It is not actually new that he objects to that: she clarifies for Sandor’s benefit. :He is not usually this upset about it. …Honestly, attempting to reform somebody’s ethics by making them cry about problems instead of fixing them seems quite counterproductive:

Wow, possibly she should have said that in private Mindspeech rather than including Leareth. It goes against all her instincts for working with him, he hates missing context, but now he just looks even sadder. She isn’t trying to comfort him because she doesn’t have the slightest idea what will help.

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Sandor has no idea what to do! Usually he doesn't interact with sad people who he doesn't know! When he does he doesn't have to work with them and they are usually sad because he has done something horrible to them!

:No one in my universe has found a way of fixing death permanently, but post-brain-death continuations of life have occurred. If my universe survives long enough, universal resurrection is plausible:

(The survival, of course, is hardly certain.)

(... His main thought about Nayoki's comment is that :There are many people who would prefer me redeemed to useless to deceased to alive:)

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Yikes??? That's definitely informative. It's probably some sort of informative about Sandor as a person, but honestly Nayoki is not very predisposed to be charitable toward the views of whoever has that opinion about him. She doesn't yet have enough of a sense of him to judge how he compares to Leareth, to what extent they actually share values - she thinks not entirely, from how his mind looked to Mindhealing Sight as he reacted to Leareth's it sounds as though your world could also use help - but, well, probably Leareth eighteen hundred years ago didn't stack up very well either. And Sandor is competent and seems to care about doing right by his team and his allies, which is most of what actually matters, in Nayoki's professional opinion. 

He's not Leareth. She's absolutely still going to be watching out for him making mistakes, misjudging priorities, in ways Leareth wouldn't, but that's largely because she knows he isn't almost two thousand years old. It's sort of not fair to compare normal humans to Leareth. 

(It's possible she would have ever had the thought that he could be better compared to a god, if she had a slightly more positive opinion of gods, but as it is, she's never even thought to make the comparison.) 

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Leareth nods. Takes a couple of deep breaths. 

:- Thank you. I - apologize for this - I need a minute and then I can keep going: 

Leareth closes his eyes and looks very focused, and internally he sets aside the screaming urgency of twenty different emotions he's somehow feeling at once; they're different emotions, but it's not a new skill, he's had to get his head together in emergencies before when something irrecoverably awful had just happened, and - it doesn't actually matter whether the emotions are really his, or a proportionate response to a real situation in the world, or whether that's even a meaningful question. He still needs to function. 

His emotions very very badly don't want him to push ahead and make decisions when he hasn't come to terms yet with all the atrocities he committed and everyone he hurt  with whatever update he may or may not actually have to make. But that's all right. He's not moving forward on any plans right now. He's just gathering information, and building a working relationship with a potential ally...

With that premise, he can wrestle his mind back into a shape where everything seems to be happening at a distance, and the body he's currently piloting isn't exactly him. 

(It takes a minute, almost exactly.) 

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Wow. Nayoki really hates it when Leareth does things like that with his head. (She's still watching him with Mindhealing Sight, as well as Sandor; it seems like the most basic of precautions.) But her aversion to it is less because she has many examples of bad consequences, and more that it's evidence about the situation being bad enough that he needs to. 

She doesn't interrupt. 

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Leareth lifts his head. 

He doesn't have all of his mind working, by any means, but he's got a corner carved out where he can let the overlearned patterns and habits of two thousand years run, sort of without "his" supervision or intervention, and that's a lot of patterns and he can run with it for a while. Not very well, he's still incredibly impaired, he approximately can't do self-reflection without breaking down in tears and this is one of the worst handicaps he can imagine for serious thinking and re-evaluation, but he trusts his people to be taking notes, and intervening if something is about to go messily wrong. 

:I think we need more context on your world: he sends, and his mindvoice sounds almost normal, but it's probably still obvious to someone with Sandor's perceptiveness that about 5% of Leareth is able to engage with this at all. :The current limited resurrection mechanism, and potential for a universal one, seems - important, but not urgent:

(He would have feelings about that, if– well, he probably is having feelings about that, they're just not steering.)

:But I would not have predicted it, which means I do not have a working model of your world's magic, and - I realize it is idiosyncratic, but you can make predictions, and I think it would be valuable for working together if you could convey the information you are using to us. That seems like a high priority. I do also want to understand the - political dynamics between superpowered people specifically, which I am guessing are not exactly the same as those between countries and governments. And it would of course be useful to know who your enemies are, what their capabilities and alliances are, and why they oppose you:

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:Understood:, he says. Leareth is disassociating vividly, which is very much not ideal, but what's he going to do, not talk to Leareth?

:There are three different elements to your request; the first is the matter of resurrection, which, as you say, can be put aside; the second is the nature of powers, and the third is the nature of the political system built around these powers. These are three separate questions, and should probably be addressed second, third, and first, in that order. Does this seem reasonable to you?:

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Leareth considers this. It takes a lot more effort to consider it than it should; it seems like half of his ability to think is out of reach, and in a baffling way, he has around the amount of raw working memory he would expect when trying to think in conditions like this, it's just that his thoughts keep unexpectedly ending in blankness. He would probably be distressed about this if he were interacting at all with the concept of emotions, which he is absolutely not going to do. 

(Some part of him notes, distantly, that in some ways he was thinking more clearly when he was also crying uncontrollably, and that's sort of interesting, something to consider later.)

 

 

:I - think so: he says, after a noticeably long pause. He moves some pieces around in his head. It feels awkward and clunky, like one of those wooden interlocking-block games for toddlers. :If - the political system is mostly built around the nature of powers, rather than the incentives of superpowered people being determined by an existing political system, then that order makes sense: 

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:Both conditions are, as it happens, true. Our powers were formed in an existing political system, which has since bent to accommodate us. But the nature of the system as it exists - particularly that of the environment that non-state actors such as myself are embedded in - is heavily defined by the nature of our powers:

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(As is usually the case, the Tyrant is reading them as they read him; in this case, he's focusing on arranging his sentence and deciding what to say - he has a dislike of dishonesty but he's obviously phrasing his arguments based on what will convince them -)

:To begin with, I am in the second generation in which powers were common, and they significantly more frequent in my own generation than in the previous. Our knowledge of them is therefore limited by time, as well as by the difficulty of understanding the subject.:

The first element: Background.

:Roughly seventy years ago, a treatment was found for a rare, hereditary disease in children, previously almost universally fatal. The treatment was refined over the next thirty years; at this point it is perfectly reliable. This is relevant because powers of the most common type, called first-order powers or genetic powers, are exhibited only by people between the age of fifteen and forty who have survived this disease. I would speculate you do not have the disease, as you do not have powers, but I do not know.:

He's skeptical that they couldn't treat it, with the level of magic they've displayed. But he doesn't know.

:Powers trigger under circumstances of extreme stress. When this stress occurs, a brief window opens lasting roughly ten seconds to two minutes - depending on the individual - in which new powers are formed by the super in question in response to the stress in question. Most commonly, the threat is external violence; the powers granted are sufficient to adapt and overcome any danger faced during this window. Large numbers of supers have powers that allow them to resist harm and to inflict it with superhuman ability; conjuring fire, enhanced strength, unnatural speed, and similar skills. If these powers would cause further harm, this harm is itself a danger for the trigger moment to grant the ability to resist. Supers of this category - 'Survivors' - are almost always immune to their own powers, directly or indirectly: He is trying to send (if they can be sent) images of Survivors in action - Heavyhand versus a tank, say, which is not at all a fair fight, or Pyre simply melting everything around him without worrying about the heat -

:Slightly more rarely, the stress may be external in the environment; difficulty focusing, or a test you desperately desire to carry out, or a healer incapable of saving a patient. This allows the existence of 'warpers' whose power alters the environment to make it more suitable to them; there are known weather controllers, say, and several warper healers. Warper powers are rarely suited for combat, but are often extremely useful indirectly. One particularly common category of powers is those that allow the user to replace the base-level laws of reality with their own vision thereof; these powers - called 'tinker' for historical reasons - are sharply restricted by the individual's viewpoint, but potentially the strongest abilities known: Steelstorm Industries moving on its own, Minerva neat and poised with a hand raised, Gateway opening a portal with a gesture -

:The least common is those people whose stress is wholly internal, and are consumed by their own despair. Their power fixes their despair by transforming them into a person they would rather be; these 'idealists' are their own idea of a perfect being, known to them or not; many of them resemble characters from my own world's legends or fiction, making the nature of powers even more difficult to parse.: Livia's unnatural perfection as she sinks six bullets into moving targets (not alive, in the interests of avoiding distracting or nauseating his hosts - robots), Voidwrath - a rotting statue of obsidian and darkness in the shape of an unnaturally muscled man, shrouded in a black aura - vampires with their fangs and charms and true monstrous faces -

:Do you follow me?:

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Nayoki has settled on reading him with Thoughtsensing again, because it's a lot to follow and having all the concepts more directly helps. She's captivated.

She's also a little curious about whether they could, in fact, cure this supposed disease. Kids do die in childhood, and Healers can't always set it right - though usually in the cases where even the best Healers with all the warning they need can't do anything, as opposed to cases where it's really just a lack of resources, of insufficient trained Gifted people and the logistics to have them check over the children regularly, usually in those cases the children don't survive more than a few years. There's definitely no common hereditary childhood disease that matches the description. And if it did exist in Velgarth, she's pretty sure that sometimes there would have been a brilliant Healer in the right place at the right time, and the shape of their world's powers is hard to miss. 

It sounds like they don't have very many Healer-equivalents, and a lot more of the equivalent of combat mages with good shielding. That must be...awkward. 

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Leareth is involuntarily noticing that in Sandor's world, Vanyel would be well placed to end up as an 'Idealist' - probably, given Vanyel's demonstrated sense of his own ideal self, a shockingly powerful one - and this is an incredibly distracting thought and he isn't exactly having emotions but he is sort of not managing to finish any coherent thoughts either. 

He doesn't answer. 

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- Nayoki is pretty sure she should do something but she honestly has no idea what? She can't even start to guess what's going on with Leareth right now! Or what Sandor just said that triggered it! Nothing's jumping out to her! 

....Sandor has a not-Gift for impossibly accurate perception, maybe including for what made Leareth get stuck like that. 

She lets out her breath, and reaches out to him with private Mindspeech. :- Do you have any guesses for what is wrong with him now?: 

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:He is in extremely poor mental shape thanks to some sort of mental attack, probably deliberately altering his moral instincts, probably via the helmet. If you can get it off that might help or might do nothing; I have no way of doing this, but I know people who could conceivably destroy it, possibly without risk to Leareth - except that the helmet might be needed intact to reverse the effect. I cannot tell exactly what is wrong with him now in particular; only that he has been very badly mentally attacked and is barraged by guilt, and having a great deal of trouble working past it. I think he is on the verge of collapse in general and would need the resources of my team to effectively try to solve this problem:

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She’s getting that sense! Terrible how she isn’t actually sure whether he and his “team” are in fact the ones they should jump to trusting! Normally she would go to Leareth for that sort of decision! Leareth, who is also the only one who can realistically replicate his Gate back to their world!

It’s not going to help at all if she proceeds to join Leareth in having some sort of emotional breakdown, so Nayoki takes a deep breath.

:How much do you have the sense that this conversation is damaging, as opposed to just - distracting? …My guess is that it will not leave him worse off afterward, aside from the time needed to calm down, and it is - maybe also giving him, and us, information about what he needs to work around in order to focus on getting a Gate back to your world and finding the rest of your faction. But I am finding it hard to predict him right now, I am used to him - not like this - and you have: SUPERPOWERED ABILITIES OF PERCEPTION :…fewer preconceptions:

Sigh. :He might find it easier to have this conversation from another room, Mindspeech works fine at that range and I - am wondering if he is using most of his capacity to cope on not appearing distressed in front of you. Or I could try reassuring him that you have already made whatever observations you were going to make about his emotional state, and it will not change that if he has to have this whole back and forth while crying? He actually seemed less impaired than this when he was more upset: 

Which is also really weird! Not necessarily for humans in general but for Leareth definitely! That doesn’t seem like precisely an ‘ethics’ thing and she’s so confused.

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Which means that the Tyrant needs to talk to Leareth.

He does not specifically like this thing that his mind does when he focuses on one human - declares them the most important thing, lets all his attention, usually devoted to dozens of important tasks, focus on comprehending one specific person. He has done it before, when it was necessary; to talk his way out of prison, to hold Voidwrath enthralled while Paragon aimed the killing blow, to clock-fight Psion with a laser pistol and an arrogant smile. And he will do it now, when he needs to. He just really hates doing it.

(Nayoki can see another reconfiguration of his outer state, through her Mindhealing state; everything below the surface remains the same, but the outer surface is changing again, parts of it almost forming a facsimile of the surface of Leareth's mind. And the mages reading his thoughts can tell that he practically has precognition, in his model of Leareth.)

:Leareth:

He pauses a moment to get his attention, and allow him time to process the words.

:You are currently having difficulty focusing, due to suppressing your emotions:

Another pause.

:They are distressing emotions, and they are painful to feel, but they are a part of you:

Another pause.

:And you are a part of reality. To ignore them is to ignore one aspect of reality; to pretend you are not feeling these emotions is to pretend an aspect of the world is not real:

Another pause.

:Suppressing these emotions is taking up attention you need more badly to use to model the current situation. It thereby makes achieving your goals more difficult, without assisting in any of them.:

Pause again.

:I have a great deal of experience working with people feeling strong emotions; I will still be able to focus even if you express your feelings, and it will assist in our mutual goals:

Pause.

:There are no atrocities you must commit; no sins that need to be carried out. Nothing you do while we talk can have horrible consequences in the near future; you can focus on feeling your emotions, and adapting to the situation, and let the ultimate consequences rest a moment until you are better prepared for them:

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Nayoki is definitely watching! It's very impressive and very unnerving - and she can pick up that on some level Sandor feels uneasy about it, which is interesting. 

...She's watching Leareth's mind as well, and it does seem to be working. 

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Leareth is at least still holding the group Mindspeech link with Nayoki – she's doing most of it – and 'hears' his name, as though from a very great distance. He tries to pay attention; it's probably important, right, even if it feels like he doesn't understand anything anymore. The pauses are helpful. He can manage to hold onto each chunk in working memory long enough to actually process it. 

Good point - yes, accurate - true and helpful and he really should have caught that himself, it's not like he's lost metacognition entirely - no, actually, he kind of had, because trying to stomp down and pave over all the very loud emotions pointed in random directions also took out most of his ability to reason at all. For some reason. He doesn't think it normally does that. 

...It helps a lot, actually, for Sandor to clearly and explicitly convey that, yes, he's considered whether Leareth having a dozen obvious and inappropriate emotions at once in front of him is going to be a problem on his end, and based on his past experience he's decided it's not. 

And the last part is something he hadn't realized he desperately needed to hear until, suddenly, it feels like a a weight lifted, an entire section of his mind he'd been holding braced against...something...now suddenly able to uncurl, and something he hadn't even realized was hurting abruptly doesn't. It's startling, in a way that yanks him fully back to his body and the current moment. 

 

:I need a moment: he manages, and tries to stop pinning his feelings down. Even though it's felt like an immense, neverending second-by-second effort, it still takes a good fifteen or twenty seconds for them to come back. 

Huh. He feels – well, not really less in the way of total awfulness, but it's broken up somewhat by some new and surprisingly strong positive emotions. He feels understood, and that feels good in a way that he wouldn't have expected. And he feels....safe? Like the fact that Sandor understands and still wants to help is incredibly important, like it's new information, and - a little like Sandor is offering to help stop him from committing any atrocities, which feels massively relieving. 

Leareth is staring at those feelings so suspiciously and doubtfully, but they keep being there???? 

 

He takes a deep breath. Inventories his body; he feels shaky, and his chest is tight and there's an ache behind his eyes, but he doesn't seem to be about to start sobbing again, which is something.

:I know: he sends. :I– thank you. That...helps. I think that I have an angle on - coping with this better - but it is clearly going to take much more work for it to hold even when I am startled by - how I am reacting to something. - Your description of Idealists reminded me of someone and my emotional reaction to that was very intense, I was not expecting it. I think I am all right at the moment, you can keep going: 

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