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. 

- 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. 

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 -

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 - 

The helmet lands on his head!

- 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. 

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!

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 - 

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 -: 

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 -

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. 

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. 

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.

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: 

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? 

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.)

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. 

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. 

(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.) 

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.  

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.)

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 -?: 

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: 

:...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?: 

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: 

????????????????????????????????????

....She will worry about what's going on with Leareth later, once the situation is at least slightly under control. 

:I will talk to him: she sends. :You should go elsewhere. Certainly if we are going to jump to removing the set-command: 

:I will be fine here, I think. I want to explain that I did not do this on purpose and have no idea who his enemies are: 

Something is VERY WRONG and Nayoki still can't really wrap her head around what, but trying to drag Leareth out of here against his will isn't going to help the situation either. 

She re-focuses all of her Sight on the armored man - mage-sight as well, why not - and reaches out with Mindspeech. :Can you understand me?: 

And suddenly his mind shifts as his attention alters - weights changing, probabilities altering, theories discarded from even basic consideration and new ones rising - He did not know that anyone with this power existed but had strong reasons to suspect it was physically possible, a concept of telepathy that does not quite match up exactly to her Mindspeech but comes very close -

:I can. And you me?:

He is paying a lot of intuitive attention to the possibility that she is the one speaking with him, but has not confirmed it yet, watching tiny details of her facial expression and body language shift (In spite of his helmet's faceplate not appearing to have any eyeholes) as they communicate.

:I can: And she can see everything else as well, but she doesn't strictly speaking have to confirm that just yet. She desperately wants Leareth's advice to navigate this conversation, and is absolutely not going to seek it when something is still mysteriously wrong with him and he won't LEAVE THE ROOM even though he might end up MURDERED. 

:I - my name is Nayoki. You are in the region north of a kingdom called Valdemar, that I doubt you have heard of. We did not kidnap you. My - colleague was testing a Gate technique and believes that he interrupted your, er, situation by accident: 

How does he react to this? 

The odds that this is a bizarrely consistent hallucination remain significantly higher than the odds that any of this is true, but aside from that his instincts are telling him that she's telling the truth, and so the highest-expected-value thing to do is play along inside the dream while not taking any decisions that risk the lives of members of the Royal Court, should his actions here be being read.

(This is what one part of his brain is doing. Another part has already leaped ahead to conclude that conditional on this being real he is in a parallel or pocket universe based on his knowledge of history, the existence of Voidwrath - a concrete concept that stays readable for only a moment, (armies of monsters/a living story/worlds contained in a spell/limitless power and childish intelligence), and the one proper noun he has so far heard. A third part is calculating how best to communicate, and a fourth part is trying to map out exactly what is happening in Detroit, back where he came from, on instinct, a fifth part Is estimating the odds that Mindseech comes with Thoughtsensing or adjacent concepts thereto, and none of this has yet reached the explicit verbal level.)

: The existence of multiple universes is almost certainly more important than the actions I was taking prior to my arrival here.: Hopefully Thei can take over and get everyone out - they drilled the plan perfectly - but and he stops thinking about that.

All of that is intriguing and also even more strange than the previous tidbits. Nayoki makes a mental note of the 'Voidwrath' concept, and the 'Detroit' placename, and that the man wasn't fighting solo, apparently he was there with a team of allies - who he must have become separated from, since Leareth didn't mention seeing them - and one of them was named Thei. She wonders who he was fighting, and why, but doesn't particularly expect him to feel comfortable just telling her, and he's (unfortunately) already caught on to the possibility that she's reading all of his thoughts and not just what he's trying to send deliberately. He seems to be rather good at controlling his own thoughts, if perhaps not quite as good as Leareth. 

:Almost certainly!: she agrees, ignoring the urge to demand to know what he DID to Leareth. :Anyway, my colleague says that he interrupted what looked to be a fight. Do you expect pursuit - does your world's magic enable instantaneous travel, by Gates or otherwise?: 

She includes Leareth as well, because even if he's worrying her, she doesn't expect things to go better if he's not kept oriented to the situation as it evolves. 

:Ask if he is injured: Leareth interjects. :He seems well-protected enough, but the fight was - violent: 

This is, on the one hand, a reasonable clarification, and on the other hand it also feels off for Leareth's usual prioritization????? 

:Is something the matter with him?: she sends, privately, to the Healers. 

:Not physically?: But the concern is evident in the Healer's reply as well. :He - seems to be behaving uncharacteristically, though. We thought maybe a head injury, but nothing's obvious to Healing-Sight: 

Fine. Nayoki can briefly turn her own sight on him. Mage-sight, at least; Leareth habitually shields out at least half of her Mindhealing-Sight, and strongly dislikes when she peeks at him without asking. 

The helmet is still on his head, and still very magical, in a bizarre alien way! 

She turns back to the strange man. :Where were you when this happened? Are you familiar with the artifact that seems to have come along with you?: She gestures at the helmet. Her mindvoice is only slightly leaking hostility and blame. 

:I do not, though it is not impossible.: He clearly has a very, very large category of things that are theoretically possible through superpowers - he isn't thinking of it as magic, though he can translate instantly - but that he does not know of anyone who can do. 

He was trying to pull off a successful evacuation; if the plan went appropriately, Thei could have incapacitated Radiant (the woman in white, apparently with ?compulsions?) and there would have been very little violence; unsurprisingly, it had not gone that cleanly.

:A battle took me through a museum. I have never seen that helmet before and have no idea what, if anything, it does.: He assumes it does nothing, essentially on base rates.

Nayoki makes a mental note of 'Radiant', pinning a name to Leareth's brief memory of the flying magical not-a-Herald, and of the not-compulsions that his world's magic can apparently pull off. 

:I see. Thank you: She even mostly believes him; his mind is bizarrely structured enough that it's not impossible he could slip a deception past her Truthseeing, but she doubts it. :Anyway. Are you injured? Do you need anything urgently?: 

She's suddenly sort of curious if his armor actually comes off. And if not, how he eats, or goes to the bathroom. 

He would actually very strongly like not be paralyzed, but thinks it is pretty reasonable of them to not provide this, because although he doesn't want to particularly, he expects he could kill them all before they noticed he was trying. (This is not so much a boastful thought as it is one of many constant combat estimations.)

:A slightly more complete explanation of where I am, and a chance to move, once you've made whatever security precautions you need to?:

(His armor does come off, that's visible in his thoughts, but he's not currently thinking about the details of how.)

Nayoki isn't delighted but she's hardly surprised. 

:Leareth: she sends privately. :I would really very much rather you go elsewhere, ideally an entirely different facility, while we negotiate with him: 

:Is your impression that he is hostile? That was not my sense, particularly. I expect we can help each other: 

This is SO WEIRD she is not used to getting into stupid confusing arguments with Leareth!!! 

:Not currently. He was - thinking that he could easily kill all of us before we had time to react, which having seen his mind as well as the abilities of his armor, I do not actually doubt. He is not currently inclined to do so but I think he is not pleased about the set-command: 

:That seems quite straightforward to remedy! You could just remove it and apologize for reacting hastily in a confusing situation: 

?????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nayoki is fairly good for a normal human at controlling her visible reactions, but Leareth knows her very well, and he can sense that she's startled and confused and discomfited by something. 

- it actually takes him several seconds to reason through why, because it feels so natural, but - no, he thinks in historical situations anywhere near this tense, he would have been the one immediately making the decision to evacuate. 

He just, for some reason, very badly doesn't want to leave Nayoki here to take on the risk in his place, let alone one of his more junior people. And he even less wants to leave the powerful stranger who he just accidentally kidnapped alone and paralyzed in a room - 

Now that he's actually noticing it, this is very odd. 

:Leareth?: 

:...Something is strange about this. I - will evacuate elsewhere, but - I wish to stay within Mindspeech range, so that I can speak with him myself if he requests it. And you should remove the set-command and then explain some things about our world: 

:Actually, I want to come talk to you as soon as possible so I can figure out what is going on with you! ...It does seem escalatory to leave the set-command in place. I will - I think if I ask him to give his word that he will not initiate violence here, I will - at least be able to get a sense from his mind of whether he means it?: The man has sort of guessed about Thoughtsensing but she doesn't think he's predicted Mindhealing Sight yet. :And I can give a quick explanation, and then leave someone else to answer his questions?: 

Leareth still doesn't like that! He...is having trouble pinning down a line of argument for why, especially on strategic lines, it mostly just feels - distasteful, incorrect, bad. 

:All right: 

He lets the Healers help him to his feet; it turns out he needs the help more than he was expecting, his shields may have protected him from serious injury but he's still bruised, and feeling shaky with the aftermath of the stress reaction. 

:I will take off the - paralysis: no need to explain how it works, :and explain a little more very soon: Nayoki sends. And then waits until Leareth is definitely multiple rooms away, on a different floor entirely, and in a shielded Work Room where he's the only one keyed to the shields. 

:This will take a minute and feel odd: she warns, and then starts unpicking the set-command, which is much slower and more laborious than placing it. 

(From his point of view, it won't feel like that much, except that he starts getting back control of his body in bits and pieces, and also it sort of feels like the corners of the room are softening and melting.) 

:I understand:

(Reading his mind, It is clearly surprising to him that it takes more than a moment; his instincts had categorized ?magic? in a great many ways, and "mental effects that can be instantly applied in an instant and removed slowly and with hallucinations" was not part of any category.)

He will not attempt to start any fights while he's becoming un-paralyzed or once it's occurred, though he is thinking of mechanisms for how he could still control his armor while physically paralyzed; he doesn't think it's physically possible but someone could still do it if he selected the right person... (with a ?rare magical ability?) and he's checking a long list of various other people and discarding most of them as possibilities, either because their ?gift? doesn't line up, or because they wouldn't work well with him and his organization (a possibility that clearly involves a risk of bodily harm to both sides).

The Healers get Leareth to one of the secure Work Rooms (the one that's behind a hidden door, that a stranger to the facility shouldn't be able to spot at all from the hallway), and lock it, and his mages put up even more shields to add to the permanent ones on the room. 

The Healers would kind of rather have Leareth in the infirmary right now, but failing that, they want him to sit down and try to relax while they make sure he's not slowly being poisoned or something. 

(Leareth really wants to be in his library right now, with paper and access to records, so he can start checking his current reasoning against some kind of more objective outside source. Failing that, though, he'll reach out through his shielding with Thoughtsensing and hold a Mindspeech link open with Nayoki, so she can keep him up to date on whatever happens next.)

Nayoki finishes. 

:Tell me if that resolved everything: she says once she's done, and the room has snapped back to its normal angles. :Do you want a moment before I explain some basics?: 

:Thank you, but I expect I will be able to manage. Please, continue:

(And he listens, balancing the possibility that this is a story designed to manipulate him with the possibility that this is a story spun out of his mind with the possibility that this is genuinely real.)

Actually, she's not totally sure how to approach this? 

:Leareth?: she tries. 

:Here: His mindvoice sounds a little more normal, though it could just be the tight shielding blocking overtones. 

:How open do you want me to be, exactly? If we do not explain that you are immortal, or - the situation with the gods - then the rest will not make sense, and he is going to notice and draw conclusions from that. He is - very good at drawing conclusions from minimal input, I think it may be some sort of Gift or equivalent. But–: 

Leareth interrupts. :Obviously you should tell him! Tell him–: 

- and then, internally, he stumbles over the next part, which is 'tell him the basic overview of our plan', because now he's thinking about the basic overview of his plan and for some reason this is setting off quite a lot of internal screaming. 

:....Never mind: he manages. :Tell him the basics. Use your judgement: 

..........Well. That's kind of concerning again, and Nayoki is suddenly unsure if her judgement should be 'don't tell him anything, leave him with some food and water and go figure out what's wrong with Leareth.' 

But Leareth isn't wrong, that contact with another world - which really seems like the only explanation at this point - is incredibly important, and first impressions with their potential ally matter. 

Nayoki takes a deep breath. :So. Explanation. ...You are currently in a secure facility in the northern tundra region, which in our world is not claimed by any country or any gods. - We have gods here, I am not sure if your world has those. Ours are sort of terrible and not very possible to cooperate with. I work for a man who calls himself Leareth - he is the one who was testing an experimental Gate and accidentally landed in your world and managed to take you back with him–: 

She cuts off, because now that she's considering it, that's exactly the kind of bizarre coincidence, either implausibly lucky or unlucky depending on how this ends up going, that she tends to blame on a particular set of actors. That's unnerving. 

:- Sorry. I am now thinking about the unlikelihood of that series of events. Our gods like to operate via coincidences, but I am not sure if I expect Them to have been able to see your world, if They are not operating there, and you would have noticed if They were. Have you?: 

And she reads his mind and watches with all of her Sight for his reaction. 

His reaction is frank confusion.

Gods are believed to exist, by some, but don't. If this is a medieval society (a complex package of ideas he has bundled together), which is what the visible technology level suggests, then quite a lot of people will believe in gods, but she actually thinks they exist, in a manner such that she predicts they will take clear actions, and is also opposed to them. (Very few people believe in powerful entities that dominate their every action and cannot effectively be resisted and don't submit to them; it's a flaw in humanity, a tendency to bend at the knees.) So her words are some evidence towards her world having gods, always conditional on it being real, but gods are such a bizarre thing for a world to have -

"Testing an experimental Gate and accidentally landed in your world" is a very common sort of Idealist origin story (an extremely complex concept that is hard to read, since it's down to a single word, but living-story-person might be the best approximation), but managed to take you back with him is not in the slightest, and he is back in extremely-implausible-hypothesis-land. He knows Voidwrath considers himself a god, and various people have gone around claiming that they are living gods who ought to be treated as such, but they're all delusional megalomaniacs (an ironic tinge to his thoughts; he knows a great many people would call him a delusional megalomaniac.) Overall this is additional complexity that slightly penalizes all his theories, which failed to predict it, but weights are shifting - 

:Our world has the concept of gods, but not any evidence that they are real.: Yet.

….She likes this man. She suspects Leareth would too. Well. Normal, functional Leareth. Current Leareth clearly likes him too, but that seems less relevant and more concerning. 

She is now even more sure that he’s from another world, because - well, the gods are subtle, but not that subtle, and his mysterious not-Gift would be especially useful for catching onto Their nudges. Probably a lot faster than Leareth did, even. 

:Our world has gods that sometimes possess people directly, or send blatant prophetic visions, or - set people on fire, occasionally. They also seem to dislike progress, in magic or non-magical technology. Leareth is opposed to this. I work for him because I also disapprove:

Reactions?

This is very greatly increasing the odds that this world is a hallucinatory trap designed to personally appeal to him. In the event that he mysteriously gets a Gate home before he wakes up, he needs to carry out no plans he wants to implement in the real world, not that any of those would be relevant if they could just go to another world with medieval technology and gods that are afraid of science.

... He'll need to consider that he's still in a hallucination if he does wake up, but he can think of a number of tests that he could run that would reduce the odds significantly, as long as the dream-world isn't perfectly faked. But he certainly shouldn't carry out the Legacy Forge operation exactly as he has it planned, not if they might be reading his mind.

:I do not particularly feel that anyone has the right to stop me from inventing whatever technology I please, no,: he agrees. :Brief estimation of your current level - wheel, writing, smelting bronze, smelting iron, aqueducts, printing press, intercontinental ships, steel manufacture, steam engines, lighter-than-air aircraft, electricity, the telegraph, heavier-than-air aircraft, horseless wagons, steel ships, mechanical computers, electronic computers...: He's thinking of the things as he names them, and in the back of his mind, subverbally, there is the fact that this is a test to see just how much information she's getting from him.

Interesting.

It’s starting to look like even more of a blatant coincidence that this man in particular was the one Leareth accidentally kidnapped, but - it’s not obviously an unfriendly coincidence? 

Well. Aside from the part where something is badly wrong with Leareth, something she doesn’t understand. 

Still, on the surface, this seems like a person Leareth could work with. And maybe more relevantly, someone she can imagine working with.

(Nayoki makes a couple of additional mental notes - and then, since the mental notes are kind of piling up now, she reaches out with a Mindtouch to her usual clerk. Who picks up immediately, because the whole facility is on high alert by now, and Nayoki can pass on everything she has so far, plus the ‘Legacy Forge operation’ concept - she’s going to be keeping a close lookout for anything more on that. And whatever he means by ‘medieval’ technology, because it seems like he’s thinking of it as - a standard stage that civilizations pass through? Which he can categorize because it’s in his world’s past, much less advanced than their current state…)

She’s following his list of technologies fine until half a dozen items in, and then starts mentally stumbling a little on the framing, or emphasis, being odd or unfamiliar. And it gets worse from there. The last couple, she can't make sense of at all - though she vaguely suspects Leareth would recognize something in the concept…

:We have wheels and writing and smelting of - various metals: she starts. She's unsure how much the purely mental concepts of different metals map to the words she knows, though she definitely has guesses. :We know about aqueducts and printing presses, though they are not widespread at this point: It's not the time to get into the turbulent history of the Eastern Empire. :Intercontinental ships have existed before, but are not currently a priority. We - make some specialized items from steel, usually with mage-work, but I am not sure if that is what you mean?: 

She takes a deep breath.

:I am not sure what you mean by 'steam engines': True, ish, she can get more of the concept from his thoughts, but she doesn't recognize it – though again, Leareth might. :There is a created species who can fly using native magic, but we do not have any non-magical flight technology and it is mostly intractable even for mages. ...I am sorry, can you repeat the last few, I lost track:

(Presumably her clerk took down notes and would remember, but she's not making an effort to show off the powers of Mindspeech right now, and she genuinely doesn't recall what came next.) 

:That is an answer to my question, as it happens. The list was 'electricity, the telegraph, heavier-than-air aircraft, horseless wagons, steel ships, mechanical computers, and electronic computers', but If they are unfamiliar to you that tells me approximately what things you have discovered, and full explanations of how they function would take longer.:

The printing press isn't widespread? Why not? Is it a recent invention or is there a story there? 'The gods', I'd they're opposed to science, but...

(He's also thinking about how this has implications about various social environments; presumably most of the population is farmers, unless magic substitutes effectively there... He should ask about magic...)

:May I ask how this magic and mage-work you have mentioned function? It can create species?:

:- Well, I cannot make any sense of the last two concepts: It's coming across as something like 'entities that think, but without souls, and made of metal or of levinbolts' and that sounds like one of the more baffling concepts she's ever heard. :And I cannot see the benefit of making ships out of steel, it does not float– ...anyway. Leareth knows far more than or anyone else alive about the peak state of our world's technology, or knowledge of lost technologies, because -: this really won't be credible if she doesn't give the real reason, and she has implicit signoff from Leareth and is desperately curious about his reaction, :- because he is immortal: 

- and there was another question there, wasn't there, but she's going to wait a moment to see the response to the first bit. 

It isn't surprising, computers are complicated. And his response to her statement about ships is a brief flash of amusement...

... Leareth is immortal. Immortality is on his to-do list. If he knows more than anyone else alive and she phrased it as "because he is immortal" instead of "because he is older than anyone else" there must be very few immortals. So it can't just be standard.

: Fascinating. Immortality has occurred but is not common, in my world.:

:It is uncommon here as well. ...Anyway. Mage-gift is one of a number of known Gifts - I am not sure if they work the same in your world, here Gifts are inherited, but not entirely predictably. Mage-gift is the most - general, broadly applicable - but also takes the most skill to use effectively. I think that no one currently alive can create species except for Leareth. Other than that, mage-gift can replicate most of the other Gifts - seeing at a distance, communication at a distance, showing illusionary images, starting fires, moving objects, shielding buildings or people - also various kinds of detection-ward for danger, or particular kinds of magic...: 

He thinks this is very interesting! He's quite confident this does not map to anything he understands, but he needs to learn more insofar as this is at all real.

:We do not; some people possess superpowers, but though the potential is hereditary -: he's thinking along strict Mendelian lines, not the word but the concept of getting one gene of a pair from your mother at random and one from your father and getting different results depending on whether they match, and if they do, which they are  :- what form it takes is largely random.: Dependant on the user's mind, on the circumstances, and on factors he does not understand.

... He wonders what species Leareth designed. He wonders why no one designed a Humanity Mark II, with better eyes and longer lifespans and pain caps and a higher IQ. He thinks you can learn a great deal, from what species someone would design if they could.

Nayoki isn't actually sure why Leareth didn't design a better human! She knows very little about his species-design work aside from the fact that he knows a lot about it and has done it before, and the details are classified even from her. She is instinctively not curious about it, out of habit (and also she has a compulsion in place for that sort of issue, but the habit is doing most of the work right now.)

That's an incredibly weird way for Gifts to work! Nayoki isn't sure what to make of it. 

:Our Gifts have a more reliable inheritance pattern in potential, although not perfectly predictable. Potential Gifts do not always awaken - some but not others might awaken, for a given child, the overall tendency correlates with magical exposure - but they can be detected either way. We do have occasional Wild Gifts that do not fit the usual system, but other than mage-gift, the common ones are - Mindspeech, Empathy, Farsight, Foresight, Fetching, Firestarting, Bardic, Healing...: 

Nayoki goes through everything, and tries deliberately to push across as much concept-context as she can along with the words. 

She leaves out Mindhealing, though. 

The Tyrant will listen to her talking about how local superpowers work basically forever! This will involve instinctively thinking about how they could be useful to solve problems back at home or how they are obviated by other problems; Mindspeech is a technological advantage on encrypted radio waves, Empathy would be stupendously useful because mental powers are rare, Farsight can be replaced by a camera, Fetching is standard TK except also teleportation?, Firestarting is obvious, Bardic is strange and complicated - maybe a Warper power? - and healing would be useful but is probably not useful enough to make up for the tech level.

He will, however, disarm while he does it, since he did make the offer; the armor he's wearing does some complicated mechanical operations to open up, and then he can take a step out of it.

He appears to be male, of broadly Valdemaran ethnicity, in his forties or fifties, and in quite good physical shape. His clothes look about as alien as his armor, though, and there's a number of metal and ?something resembling metal? gadgets in his pockets and on his belt that he has not thought of the uses of at all while he was here.

Huh. Nayoki doesn't ask about the gadgets, though she's rather curious and keeps an eye out for any incidental thoughts. Watching the armor come off is especially interesting, and she's already planning to ask about it once she finishes going through the list of Gifts. 

- she doesn't have a chance to ask, though, because one of the Healers interrupts her with a Mindtouch when she's still in the middle of explaining Animal Mindspeech. She had to duck out of the Work Room for this, but it seems worth the risk. 

:Nayoki, I think you need to come right now. Something's badly wrong with Leareth and none of us can see anything...: 

Nayoki freezes, cutting off mid-Mindspeech sentence to their visitor-slash-prisoner. 

:What: 

:He's just - really really upset? And his explanation of why doesn't make any sense? - Can you just come over. Please: 

Nayoki...is honestly, at this point, pretty worried that she isn't going to be able to do any better. She's in over her head; she could deal with an entire foreign world's foreign magic if she had Leareth working with her, and the entire point is that she...doesn't. Not really. 

There's exactly one person within reach who has any context on the other world's magic. 

She - would kind of have preferred to learn more and give herself some time to think before making a call on how far to trust him. But her impression so far is a lot more positive that she had expected going into this. She has a sense that, at the very least, this is a man who will predictably follow incentives. Leareth's organization is very good at working with that. 

She refocuses her attention on him. :- Sorry: she sends, and doesn't entirely try to hide that she's shaken. :I - we have a problem, which I am almost certain is due to magic from your world, not ours, and so I think I need your advice: 

"Oh?" He probably can't help much, because superpowers have an absolutely nonsensical range of possibilities, but he's happy to try anyway. "I'm always happy to help." With people who he expects can repay him, but they totally can.

:All right. I - am going to go in and see Leareth alone first, but we suspect he is under some kind of mind-affecting magic, of a variety native to your world and not ours. He is behaving uncharacteristically and does not seem to have any insight into why, and apparently he is now in distress: 

She takes a deep breath. :Are you willing to wait here? I am needed there, but if you are willing, I would send someone else with Mindspeech and experience in mage-work to hear everything you know about types of mind-affecting power you have encountered before, or - have not encountered but think ought be possible: 

:Certainly, though I would appreciate it if I could also ask them more questions about their own work: A trade for a trade.

:A reasonable request. I think we can arrange that. It will be a couple of minutes - do you need food or water, in the meantime?: 

And she's going to send one of the senior researchers who, as well as being very knowledgeable, is under the usual voluntary compulsions to prevent sensitive information from leaking. It's not as much protection as she would like, given the man's insane perceptive abilities, but at least it's something. 

He has had a sudden and horrible realization that in restrospect he should have had earlier.

:Do you have any way for your healers to determine if either of us is carrying any diseases to which the other has no resistance?:

He should have thought of it before he got out of his armor - contact between two continents almost wiped out the population of the less industrialized one and this is two worlds - 

Nayoki hadn't thought of that at ALL. In fairness to her, it's the sort of paranoia she usually leaves to Leareth, and she's been very distracted. 

:- We should check. And avoid unnecessary exposure in either direction until we have checked. It is not trivial to check but I think we ought have Healers with the skill to do it. I - should arrange that as the first priority, then. And - sorry - I should probably also leave, and have someone check me before I interact with any of the others. Would there have been any risk while you were still wearing your armor?:  

:It is possible that there could have been microbes on the surface of it that might cause a problem, it was not sterilized, but no transmission to or from me while I wore it:

Slightly increasing the odds that she's reading his mind, medieval armor isn't airtight but of course she could have told that it was in dozens of different ways -

Nod. (Nayoki isn't actually sure if she picked that up from his thoughts, or purely by looking at the thing, and either way she's not actually that bothered if he, at this point, correctly infers that they're reading his mind, and he seems to consider it fair game.) 

:Well, fortunately Healers are unusually able to protect themselves from infection, and I think they can do something to protect others if they were only briefly exposed to something in the air. I will send someone to come check, and - we should probably not send a mage in the room with you, but Mindspeech works fine from a few rooms away: 

From a lot further than that, actually, but she's still being a little cagey with him. 

She goes. 

The Healer arrives within about three minutes. She's wearing a silk scarf over her nose and mouth, because even if she can murder any airborne infection that tries to start in her throat or nose, she might as well not make extra work for herself. 

:My name is Emril. I will need to touch you to do this most effectively: 

:I understand. Go ahead.:

To the extent he's focusing on anything, instead of just trying to pick up a lot of information, he's trying to focus on the question of whether the Healer is trying to assassinate him, so he can defend himself if worst comes to worst. But even this isn't very likely, so.

There is no murder attempt! Emril is mostly quiet - she hasn't had much of a briefing on the stranger, except that he's from another world and it's a very high stakes situation. (And separately she heard Leareth is - ill, or drugged, or something - and she's pretty stressed about it.) 

Nayoki lets another of the most skilled Healers do a thorough pass at murdering the hell out of any non-her lifeforce on her skin or mucous membranes. It's pretty uncomfortable, and not the sort of thing you want to have done to you all the time (Healers can do it more precisely on themselves), but it's much faster than trying to figure out if she's picked up anything new. 

And then she takes a deep breath, and forges into the Work Room to see Leareth. 

Someone's brought him a blanket. He's pale and trembling and isn't currently crying but looks like he maybe was at some point in the last couple of minutes. He doesn't make eye contact with Nayoki. 

This is so concerning! 

Nayoki approaches slowly, not making any sudden movements, and sits down beside him on the stone floor. (It's probably overkill to have him in here? It's not exactly a comfortable or soothing environment.) 

"Hey," she says, as gently as she can manage. "Leareth. What is bothering you?" 

Leareth still doesn't look at her. He does shift a little, though, and stares at his own hands with an expression of utter anguish. 

WHAT is GOING ON. 

"Leareth," she repeats. "Can you please try to talk to me about what you are feeling?" 

He swallows convulsively, tries to speak, and then shakes his head helplessly and reaches out with Mindspeech. The overtones are a lot, misery and revulsion and horror and shame, a mix of emotions that she's never seen in him before. 

:This body does not belong to me. I - stole it from an innocent child, I murdered him to wear his skin - and used his body to hurt innocent people just because they were in my way, and I - I cannot stop thinking about it -: He takes a shuddering breath. :I did so many awful things, and it keeps - it keeps not paying off, and it would not be all right even if it had, I just - I feel sick...: 

Nayoki sort of wants to slap him, but that won't help at all. 

:Leareth, I think you were hit by some kind of spell from the other world. We are going to try to figure it out and undo it, all right? But - you need to remember that this is not real, what you are feeling is not really you, it is some sort of compulsion: 

Based on the face Leareth makes at her, this doesn't help at all. 

If he were anyone else, she would want to give him a hug, but this is absolutely not going to help. She tries to hold very still. Wishes, for a moment, that she had any amount of actual experience using Mindhealing in the normal way with patients. 

:I know you are in pain. Just - what sort of advice would you give Vanyel, if he were having some sort of guilt spiral about - having had to do something he would have preferred was not necessary?: 

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

And Leareth now -? 

The core is the same. So, at a glance, it's not clear why the outside is suddenly so unstable? The most alarming part is that it's still changing, right in front of her - as though some foundation that she can't see directly was abruptly moved, and now everything is unbalanced, and only halfway through finding its way to a new resting state... 

The core is the same, but the surface crust of his mind is - collapsing, shattering, fragmenting and falling and setting off new cascades - and she has to look deeper to even start to see why. 

- huh. The messier middle layers of his mind are - spreading, connections forming and strengthening, destabilizing other parts - but at a purely local level, they're - somehow clearer, simpler? 

Leareth's mind has always been one that propagates patterns further, more deeply, than most people. And Nayoki can see the nudged-aside patterns lighting up, sending out ripples, still ultimately tied to the center of him, but tearing apart other structures, even the ones braided in at a deep long-established level...

Leareth tries to think. 

A superficial, obviously-wrong but maybe still useful gloss is that he cares about people more? (Relative to what? relative to things that aren't people - abstract principles? That doesn't feel like it captures it.) 

Another probably-wrong simplification is that he cares about the short-term more and the long-term less?

...It feels true that the Leareth of the past was missing something important, that he was underweighting some key component of what it even means to fight for the flourishing of all sentient beings now and forever? 

Well. Maybe he was. It wouldn't be the first time that he only saw the obvious in hindsight. This is....kind of the story of his entire life, actually.

The process for dealing with having been wrong about a fundamental basis of reasoning and prioritization is actually not dissimilar to updating on a mistake about something factual and concrete. And the first step is to understand what went wrong.

Possibly the thing that went wrong is just that he's being mind-controlled (- flinch -) but - it's also normal to flinch from admitting to a real mistake.

So his usual process for doing a post-mortem on his mistakes should...still...apply....?  

To Nayoki's Sight, a not-quite-visible source of frantic desperate tension in Leareth's mind is suddenly released, a little. The connections to his core are a little stronger, relative to the random noise.

(Senjas is going to keep reading their visitor's mind, while intermittently poking one of the other mages to check if Nayoki is available yet.) 

Emril interrupts Sandor a few minutes later. 

:You're definitely not sick with anything, which means you're not going to be very contagious for whatever you're carrying. You seem to be carrying the same general amount of tiny-life-forces that people here do, and they're maybe a little different to my Sight but I can't actually get more than that? ....Anyway, my thought is that we can protect you by having a Healer check you regularly, and only having you work with people in person if it's really necessary. And we can minimize the risk of you getting any of us sick if I burn out whatever's growing on your skin, and in your nose and throat and, er, your rectum. - Is that all right?: 

He mostly thinks incomprehensible thoughts and adjusts probability weights, at various points referencing incomprehensible thoughts about machines that can do math very quickly and laborers made of solid steel and flying machines, until he's contacted again, when -

:That seems reasonable. I expect my own staff can do more thorough checks once we are back in contact with them: He is thinking that Prudence will love this place, once she gets over the potentially increased risk of horrible death; he expects he can convince her that she can grant herself all the Gifts she wants, which will therefore be true, and probably pass them on to others, too.

( Senjas, still listening in, is SO INTRIGUED by the brief flickering thought about "machines that can do math very quickly". He doesn't understand it but he thinks his wife could make more sense of it? Certainly Leareth could. Though apparently their main problem is that Leareth is incapacitated right now. Anyway, he notes down everything he can.) 

:Good idea: Emril says, and then, :this might tingle but it shouldn't hurt, please tell me if it hurts:

(It doesn't hurt. 'Tingling' isn't exactly the right description, it feels very odd and at some points like it should hurt and yet somehow doesn't.) 

:It does not hurt. Thank you.: Bring in Prudence, bring in Steelstorm... bring in everyone, really, they can manage even if it's an arctic environment, this program really does just seem to render the war plan unnecessary...

Except, of course, for the one little hitch. He'll want to ask more about how the gods function, once he has the chance again.

(Senjas continues to be impressed and curious, and is definitely noting down 'Prudence' - who can apparently maybe give herself Gifts??? - and 'Steelstorm' whoever that is...) 

Emril is about halfway through her work when she hears from one of the other Healers that Nayoki is out of ideas, but thinks Leareth is stable enough that it's fine to have their visitor from another world come meet with him. She doesn't say anything, just keeps going. 

Leareth very badly wants paper to take notes on. And, ideally, to be in his own private shielded room where no one is going to watch him take notes.

He's aware that Nayoki has a point about how he's probably compromised in some way, and more to the point he doesn't expect that his argument for why he needs privacy anyway will convince her, so he doesn't say anything, and keeps trying to think. 

:- I'm done: Emril sends, finally. :We'd like you to be pretty careful for the next while about cleaning your hands after using the privy, but I'm not that worried. Anyway. I think Nayoki wants to talk to you again, if you're up for that?: 

:Of course: he says. :Lead the way:

Emril will lead the way! 

Nayoki is currently in the process of relocating Leareth to somewhere else which is not the most secure and hidden Work Room in this facility, since it seems like a good idea to keep that in reserve. ...Probably. She is kind of distracted right now, and mostly making decisions on instinct, and by checking against her expectation of what normal-Leareth would point out was insufficiently paranoid. 

So Emril will guide Sandor to a comfortably appointed conference room, where Leareth is already sitting, looking only mildly distressed. 

Oh, good, he's in range and Nayoki can point all of her Sight at him again!

...What's he thinking right now? How does his mind look? 

The precise configuration of the outer confectionary has shifted, with the color scheme and frosting composition slightly altered and details of the cake-crenellations different, but everything below that level is essentially the same. He's presently thinking about how to make a good impression, which mostly involves analyzing Leareth and Nayoki a lot.

He'll nod, as he comes in.

... And then he'll start calculating really, really, bizarrely fast. It's difficult to read his mind just because of the speed of the information flow, everything's subverbal, but in a moment the thoughts can be followed - 

Leareth has just had a critical shock, then got over it surprisingly fast, but is still updating -

He is extremely controlled under normal circumstances, and this is an unusual failure - 

Nayoki is extremely grateful to Leareth, extremely loyal, extremely worried - 

Leareth is the sort-of-person-who-collaborates and can be trusted to make and keep deals except that he is currently under immense shock and many facts about him are rapidly shifting -

Nayoki is afraid because of her fear that Leareth has been damaged -

Leareth does not think he has been damaged, just that he has had a realization that made him desire to alter his plans -

Nayoki is the sort-of-person-who-distrusts-authority-figures except Leareth -

Leareth is an immortal - 

He is having constant emotional updates; about five percent of them are positive -

And more, and more, and more, information flooding in from minor details of how everyone moves or doesn't move or tenses their muscles or controls their expression or - 

:Leareth. Is there anything I can do to assist?:

(To anyone reading his mind, his fundamental intention is to say a greeting that is helpful and inclined to make his hosts feel positively towards him without being deceptive.)

Conveniently, the new conference room locale doesn't have such thorough shielding, which means that about eight Thoughtsensers are currently listening in from a distance and noting down whatever they can catch!

...It's pretty confusing and overwhelming. They're doing their best, though. 

(Nayoki is mostly only watching with Mindhealing-Sight, holding her Thoughtsensing just open enough to pick up deliberately projected surface thoughts; it's less distracting, and probably not something their visitor is already tracking - she's picked up by now that he makes inferences from tiny observations on a level that far exceeds what even Leareth at his best can pull off...) 

...Leareth wasn't actually holding his Thoughtsensing open, and Sandor doesn't have projective Mindspeech. 

(Well, Nayoki can relay, then.) 

Leareth lifts his head. 

:...I am not sure. I suspect I am still under the ongoing influence of a mind-affecting artifact from your world, but my sense is that your magic is very idiosyncratic, so I - do not actually expect you to have advice or solutions: 

(His mindvoice is very level, directionally-shielded enough not to leak any overtones at all, and his visible body language is controlled and neutral, but it may still be apparent to sufficiently superpowered perceptions that he is in agonizing emotional pain, and mostly sort of in control of it, but just barely.) 

... Well. Leareth is impressive.

:I do not, though others in my world might know of some idiosyncrasy that counters this idiosyncrasy, or of means to track down more information about how it was created: He is on friendly terms with an immortal, back home, even if she is fairly young as immortals go.

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 - 

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.

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 -:

: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.

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. 

...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. 

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. 

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.

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:)

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.) 

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.) 

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. 

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:

: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?:

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: 

: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:

(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?:

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. 

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. 

- 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?: 

: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:

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.

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:

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. 

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: 

:You are very welcome.:

He's curious who this Idealist friend is (he thinks friend is probably but not certainly appropriate, from Leareth's body language), but will refrain from commenting.

:The political background to the arrival of superpowers was... complicated. Powers had theoretically existed before that, but had been broadly unknown; history had instead been shaped by the development in one region of the world, Europe, which had ended up with skills at engineering, trade and warfare superior to its competitors in other parts of the world; these developments lead to an ‘industrial revolution’ by which my world shifted from more than ninety percent of the its population being farmers to roughly a quarter, with the energies thus released turning to scientific and technological development, as well as to war:

:Europe used these skills in warfare to found colonies in low-populated regions as well as to conquer the rest of the world, barring a few countries who adapted European methods and joined the ranks of the imperial powers. Conflict, however, arose between those European countries that had gained an early colonial lead, and the latecomers, European and non-, triggering two nearly planet-wide wars:

:The second of these occurred shortly before my birth; it brought with it the collapse of the overseas empires of the European empires, thanks to guerilla warfare, military exhaustion, and the recognition that a hegemony founded on trade was easier to maintain than one founded on conquest:

:Do you follow, so far?:

They got as low as 25% of the population required to be farmers??? On one level Leareth isn't surprised, he can extrapolate and he can do math and he's pretty sure a real industrial revolution, one that actually has a chance to get some momentum going, can actually get a lot further than that. 

He has feelings about this! It's actually kind of hard to figure out what his feelings about it are! One of them is anger, which is unusual, and this is a new flavor of it too, it's - itchy, restless, an almost physical heat and pressure...

His feelings about the global-scale wars are a lot stronger! He actually physically reels back in his seat a little, some of the color leaving his face. 

But he can stay in control, mostly. :- Yes. Following: 

Huh. Leareth is still reacting to everything so much more than usual, and not the sorts of reactions she expects. 

:The political situation into which I was born, then, was one of feud between the victors of the ‘Second World War’. Both the United States of America, the country into which I was born and a nominal republic, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - more commonly known as ‘Russia’ - were on the winning side during the second World War; both of them possessed arsenals of apocalyptic superweapons - the ‘nuclear bomb’, first among these weapons, had been developed during the Second War and used, once, to end it. Both of the victorious Powers had developed overwhelming stockpiles of them, which they intended to use for the purpose of annihilating the other, should war threaten; most likely both would, and take either the majority or all of humanity with them.:

:It was known, to me, as a child, and to all the other children I grew up with, that one day these weapons would be used, and all life on earth would end, and then it would be over. This was the sword, hanging over our heads. Political crises occurred in which threats were made particularly loudly to use them; politicians suggested ways of stopping them, and other politicians argued that ‘the other side’ would use the weapons the moment before any defense against them could be implemented.:

:It was, you understand, politicians who claimed to make the decisions; the United States of America was a nominal republic; in theory, the citizens of each region elected representatives, these representatives forming a legislature, with the legislature sharing power with a national leader elected by the entire country. In practice, power had largely passed to a collection of bureaucracies, intelligence agencies and military organizations more focused on retaining power and wealth than on serving the people of or even the interests of nation. With little influence on genuine decisionmaking, elected leaders focused more on redistributing wealth away from their competitors towards their own constituents, each plundering the nation to please a portion of it. Russia was in a still worse position, with an even thinner democratic facade and direct attempts by its corrupt and incompetent government to run every aspect of its national economy directly, producing mass famines.:

He does, in fact, believe what he is saying, though it is also rhetoric.

:And it was in this world that superpowers came to prominence. It was an age in which the dreams of utopia of the past were crumbling and men were divided on whether they should be replaced or repaired or we should surrender to a dreamless world, a world where doom would one day come on wings of flame, and none would know its coming. And then… some people had powers; individuals, chosen apparently randomly, who were suddenly strong enough to affect the world.:

The vision, to him, so young, that he could actually do things. That fate had placed him in a position where he was not a slave.

:They were, by and large, divided into three groups. The first was the unambitious, who went on with their normal lives, and they have added to the wealth of their nations, but they have had little effect on the world at large. The second hold that the system as it existed functioned, should be supported, and that their essential duty was to protect it from its enemies. They have been called heroes, and while some are merely vanity-seeking, many of them truly are among the best the world has to offer. The great majority amongst them, though are simply taking the simplest path; all the world hails their decision as correct, and they are rewarded with fame and fortune provided they stick to the pattern that has been laid out for them - a bargain with the machine which limits their ability to truly change anything. They catch criminals and cannot make any change to the rules that make them, for the system is slow, inflexible, lacking in precision; a few adjustments have been made to make it less of a tyranny, after great effort by many of the cleverest people, but it remains fundamentally incompetent, and so those bound to its will can save a life or two, but not stop the clock that ticks to destruction.: He is thinking about the "Sanguinary Laws," because the killer's name was more famous than her victims; they were the climax to forty years of work by a political genius and were mostly obsolete before five more have passed.

:And the third is mine. Those that cannot - or will not - live in the world as it is. We are called villains. Not all of us have ambition; there are those that are merely criminals, though I try to make better use of them than a life of crime, guiding them to see what they could truly work for if they accepted genuine freedom, and realize their true potential. Some are villains because desire to make glorious inventions to broaden the world but cannot find the permits and licenses they need to do it under the law; some have powers of tremendous scope to shape the lands around them and yet are barred from its use; others, and I am one, have seen the troubles of this world, and do not think it can be mended peacefully. I grew up in a world where the governments of the world had no better plan to save humanity than to destroy it, and I decided I could run the world better, and, frankly, had to. I will not yield to the law; I declare that I have my own rights and will trample the law underfoot if it is for the sake of my own world; I am called a tyrant for I am free, and those who follow my banner share in this; I advise them and guide them and they accept my rule by their own free choice, and admit no other:

:Today, the balance between the factions is this. ‘Villains’ outside the law steal the tools they need to implement some plan, occasionally intended to permanently improve the world but usually just some ploy to win wealth and fame; they are foiled by ‘heroes,’ backed by ordinary law-enforcement and occasionally the army, and, should they be considered not overly dangerous, or should they have the power to bribe the government, they are imprisoned or recruited. If they are thought too dangerous they are killed.: There are a number of images going through his head, of fancy costumes and dramatic speeches and plots to steal sunlight and robberies of marble-faced buildings where people in masks and costumes go in with deadly weapons and come out with bags full of paper.

:‘Heroes’ devote their energy to fighting ‘villains’, for they have no better way to improve the world, and are honored in exchange, and told they have made the right decision.: He’s thinking of exceptions to this; Minerva has genuinely tried to make things better, even if she’s not very good at it, and various people who are just out to make a lot of money have also done some effective healing in the process. :Meanwhile, the occasional entity in the ‘fourth category’ appears - something that is too alien to the world even to be called a villain - engages in a rampage, causes great devastation, and is put down temporarily or permanently.: The Necromancer, at least, is gone. :There are powers that have appeared that are dangerous on a potentially apocalyptic scale, and so far it is coincidence that they have not been misused to wipe out all life - coincidence, and a handful of people, primarily the true heroes, : (and also himself, though he doesn’t say that) :who have so far solved individual crises. These problems will fail eventually.: Voidwrath has not noticed he can destroy the world; when he does, they will all be dead unless someone destroys the indestructible. (And there’s another example he’s deliberately not thinking of.)

:My solution, which I admit is imperfect, is to individually recruit as many of the ‘villains’ worst misusing their talents as possible, found a new nation, shaping a society in which they can flourish, recruiting immigrants from the most desperately mismanaged dictatorships to provide manpower, and then use the resources I am provided with to try to find permanent solutions to the world’s problems.: His solution is imperfect in large part because he is tired; one of the things he most needs to do is to cure mortality, before all the people he’s relying on, himself included, lose all their energy and then die. :I am very eager to see what a new world can provide in terms of better solutions.:

Leareth is doing his best to follow along closely.

He is also still operating under some deeply inconvenient cognitive constraints! Letting himself experience emotions does seem to be helping, in terms of how far he can follow a particular line of thought, but it's still hitting his working memory capacity, and he really can only follow one line of thought at a time.

Fortunately, he has paper to take notes on, and failing that he can Mindspeak one of his clerks - not Nayoki, she would be justifiably offended if Leareth just wanted her to be a scribe for him where did that thought come from he's confused again - 

- nevermind, focus - 

Leareth is very concerned about the 'apocalyptic superweapons' involved in their global-scale war! Apparently not even the first global-scale war! 

and used, once, to end it.

Sandor doesn't add any details. Leareth isn't about to interrupt - it seems like it might be a sensitive topic - but he has questions. And concerns. 

Nayoki is more on top of actually relaying note-taking requests to one of her assistants outside the room. She isn't delighted to hear about the overwhelming stockpiles of world-destroying weapons, but said stockpiles are still in another world, one which they won't be able to access again until Leareth is more functional and can figure out Gates - 

- or until someone with a superpower their visitor isn't even aware of - which seems not-implausible given their bizarre magic system and baffling politics - manages to follow him to this world? 

Nayoki isn't that worried, at this point, but she sends out a warning anyway. Leareth doesn't have any prepared contingency-plans that exactly match this scenario, but he has one close enough to be useful. Hopefully. 

Leareth...almost can't feel anything about the massive stockpiles of apocalyptic superweapons. He's trying to guess at what 'apocalyptic' actually means - destroying an entire city in a single blast, maybe, and - 

- and

 no, even though it's clearly appropriate to have strong emotions about the weapon(s) that Urtho deployed that set off the Cataclysm (whatever those weapons were, he still doesn't understand what happened but he thinks or at least desperately hopes it wasn't his doing) - he still needs to keep listening to Sandor's explanation.

It was known, to me, as a child, and to all the other children I grew up with, that one day these weapons would be used, and all life on earth would end, and then it would be over

Great now he feels like crying again, this is so distracting– 

Focus. Why is this upsetting? He can afford a second or two to chase that thread....

Bizarrely, it's mostly not because he's imagining being the child growing up in a doomed world? It's - that he's imagining being the parent of said child– this is almost certainly not a useful line of thought, but Leareth apparently can't help but follow it -

- Leareth zones back in just in time to catch in which threats were made particularly loudly and he can follow the incentive structure being described, he can make sense of it as a logical construct - obviously the premises of this bizarre logic simulation are stupid but he's not thinking about that right now that's for later he's notthinkingaboutit–

In theory, the citizens of each region elected representatives, these representatives forming a legislature, with the legislature sharing power with a national leader elected by the entire country.

Leareth can see where this is going. 

(...Can he? It feels like it, but - what's his actual prediction -?) 

In practice, power had largely passed to a collection of bureaucracies, intelligence agencies and military organizations more focused on retaining power and wealth than on serving the people of or even the interests of nation. 

....Yeah, no, this perfectly fits with his prediction (that he didn't have time to even finish defining, so it's unclear how meaningful it should be, but– but actually he isn't going to dwell on that right now, he has more important priorities, for example being incredibly angry about the concept of institutions focused on holding onto their power and resources rather than accomplishing their ostensible goals - 

what– 

he doesn't think this is an emotional response he's tended to have before, although it's hard to tell because his past self was wrong about everything

no stop that doesn't seem right

because his present self is under foreign mind control  

NOPE NOPE NOPE– 

(what) 

....This continues to be a very annoying set of mental constraints to be under while trying to deal with an actual urgent situation, and Leareth is 

(carefully not leaning too hard into thinking about his true enemies in Velgarth, since that's probably its own new pit of unexpected emotions which he does not at all have time for - yet - it's apparently very important for some part of him to include the yet there -)

- and, again, Leareth is pretty sure he missed some words there, because even the most situationally-appropriate emotions are deeply inconvenient - 

(He's distantly annoyed with whoever did this to him to try to "fix his ethics" or whatever their goal was, it still seems like a rather poorly-thought-out process - if he were in charge of how the ethics-editing magic worked, he's pretty sure he could make it less violating, less - denying someone their freedom and not even admitting to it–) 

((Leareth does not, quite, have enough available metacognition to notice explicitly that his already-mostly-subconscious objections are not the usual flavor of objection he would have, but he almost notices, at least enough to feel vague unease -))

He has more important things to focus on, though.

And it was in this world that superpowers came to prominence. It was an age in which the dreams of utopia of the past were crumbling and men were divided on whether they should be replaced or repaired or we should surrender to a dreamless world, a world where doom would one day come on wings of flame, and none would know its coming.

Well that's horrifying and upsetting!!! And not in any way acceptable!!!

- somehow he's having to remind himself again that the emergency isn't happening right here right now right in front of him – that Sandor is recounting events from years ago in another world. It's just that he really doesn't have any engrained habits for reminding himself of this sort of cognitive mistake, if anything it's the opposite of his usual errors - 

- the opposite. Huh. Leareth...feels like this isn't the first time he's noticed. Just, maybe, the first time he's named it explicitly. But...yes, it does suddenly feel like he's making the exact inverse errors of his previous mistakes - which, of course, didn't feel like mistakes from the inside, at the time - and his current intuitions feel deeply right, in a way that makes his past missteps so starkly obvious, but he's not blind to the symmetry there - 

Sandor is talking again (though he is pacing the speech so that Leareth can mostly keep up, despite his mind constantly falling into unexpected pit traps that didn't used to be there). 

The unambitious don't make any more sense to him than they ever did, but it's their prerogative, obviously, to live their lives the way they want - and, just like Gifts, the superpowers of Sandor's world aren't chosen. (He wonders if they require training to use to their full potential. That would be its own challenge, given how varied they are, how each person's set of powers is unique...) 

The 'heroes' – well, he has some sympathy for them. They sound a little like the Heralds, actually, though perhaps not recruited quite so involuntarily. He can understand wanting security, stability - wanting someone to tell you that you're doing the right thing - and it's not enough, of course, it's never been enough, that's no different in Sandor's world than in his own. He's tried it that way, tried being the one writing the laws, and look where the Eastern Empire ended up. It feels like a fundamental truism, that a system designed - or, more likely, emerging by accident over centuries, like most governments - in times of scarcity and turmoil, is never going to be the tool needed for bringing a world to the point where all the problems are fixed. 

(...Is that a new intuition? He's having a hard time telling, which is its own kind of unnerving; he thinks the observations he's calling to mind are all real, and all things he had already noticed and updated on, but did he lay out it from that angle before?) 

Nayoki is pretty curious about the "Sanguinary Laws", but she doesn't interrupt. Leareth is having enough trouble following, and besides, she's enjoying the speech. It's being carefully presented, of course, framed to be persuasive to its particular audience, but she can appreciate skill at persuasion. 

- and Sandor isn't accepting the unacceptable, any more than Leareth himself would. It's giving Leareth some new flavors of surprisingly strong emotion - for once, positive feelings. Of - kinship, recognition, and something he doesn't have a better word for than 'the opposite of loneliness', because he's not sure he's ever felt it before. 

(He can notice that the phrasing is probably carefully-chosen, but the parts of him that are usually running suspicion and paranoia don't seem to be working.) 

I advise them and guide them and they accept my rule by their own free choice, and admit no other

In his best moments, he's tried to follow that vision. To do right by his people now, not just promise to do better in the distant future. But he's been willing to compromise that ideal, hasn't he? There are people in his organization still under involuntary compulsions. He kidnapped children, and told himself it was justified, that it would be worth it in the end, but how could it possibly be?

Sandor isn't wrong, that you can't get from here to there with peaceful, incremental changes made within the limits of the system. That breaking the law, including violently, needs to be on the table. But suddenly it feels - not even just unjustified, or unlikely to succeed, but incoherent, that he could ever have thought he could build a freer world by enslaving people. 

Nayoki probably isn't going to let him reverse those policies, while she still thinks something is wrong with him. 

He feels sick again. 

Even if that's being carefully presented, which it obviously is, it says something about the man how he's choosing to present it. Nayoki likes him. 

...She's also very confused about what Leareth can possibly be upset about now. 

Meanwhile, the occasional entity in the ‘fourth category’ appears - something that is too alien to the world even to be called a villain - engages in a rampage, causes great devastation, and is put down temporarily or permanently

There are powers that have appeared that are dangerous on a potentially apocalyptic scale, and so far it is coincidence that they have not been misused to wipe out all life 

That's terrifying. No wonder Sandor is desperate. Leareth would be too, in his position. He hasn't felt that kind of existential fear for his world and its civilization since the years just after the Cataclysm. 

He wants to help. Wants it with a force that he's rarely wanted anything, that pushes him off-balance but, oddly, not in a way that actually bothers him; it feels correct, the only appropriate response to a situation this dire. Sandor deserves better, his allies deserve better, than to be called villains for being the only people brave enough to protect their planet and its people. He has an intense urge to say something, to convey that he understands it, that he knows what it's like to live in a world under threat - his mind doesn't seem to have actually formulated any words for him - 

My solution, which I admit is imperfect, is to individually recruit as many of the ‘villains’ worst misusing their talents as possible, found a new nation, shaping a society in which they can flourish, recruiting immigrants from the most desperately mismanaged dictatorships to provide manpower, and then use the resources I am provided with to try to find permanent solutions to the world’s problems.

Imperfect, maybe, but a start, and maybe the only winning strategy here. Not just a base of resources, that - unlike the resources of the government and supposed 'heroes' - can be flexibly directed towards the ever-shifting needs of the moment, but - spreading the vision that generated this plan in the first place, showing them a microcosm of what's possible, of what succeeding even looks like. Giving them the precious gift of believing they, personally, can make things better.

It makes him imagine a man with a torch, conveying that little flame to others, building a pocket of hope in a world under siege. It's not just the resources - with every person added to the mission, they can take a step closer to the world where they've already won... 

(Another regret to add to his infinite list: all of the times when he didn't follow that precept, when he did treat his people as nothing more than tools, and how can you possibly do right by the world if you start by wronging the people closest to you?) 

He can tell that Sandor is tired. He wants to say that he understands that, too, that he's felt it for a thousand years, even if he eventually learned to bear it well enough that he wouldn't have said he was ongoingly tired. 

Intellectually, he's not sure what he's hoping to actually accomplish by telling Sandor that he understands this and that, so he doesn't say anything. 

Nayoki makes a mental note of 'Necromancer' - she does not like the connotations of that concept at all - and resists the urge to go digging for whatever Sandor is deliberately not thinking of. 

...She's not sure immortality actually helps, that much, with the tiredness problem. Leareth may not have admitted to it, before, but she's not blind. In the rare moments when he lets down his guard, she can tell how heavily the centuries weigh on him. But immortality does give him time to be patient, and careful, and to learn how to carry that much weight on his own.

(In moments, she's wished she could do more to share that burden, but not very hard. She's not sure she could even if she tried, and Leareth has never asked for it.) 

Leareth takes almost a minute of silence to make sure he's digested all of that, and that his notes are even slightly legible.

:Thank you: he says finally. :All of that makes sense, I think. I - am also eager to see what we can do to help: 

(It's probably noticeable to Sandor that, despite Leareth's emotional ups and downs throughout the explanation, he's overall calmer now, and - not more in control, exactly, but steadier. It turns out that when he stops trying so hard to be in control of his mind and his emotions, and just rides it, the resulting state doesn't actually bother him nearly as much as he would have expected.) 

:Thank you: he says. :Let me know if you have any questions.:

A pause. :I think my three highest priorities are attempting to return to contact with my organization, attempting to update myself on the limits of your gods at long range, and research on the limitations of your Gates for establishing exceptionally long-range travel - such as to other planets within one of our universes - with broadly developing my understanding of your magic as a fourth:

Leareth nods. 

:Re-establishing contact with your organization is going to require Gate-research in itself. Ending up in your world was not the result I expected from my experiment, so clearly there are factors here that I do not yet understand, and I doubt I will be able to reliably reach your world again on purpose until I have studied them in more depth: 

He considers for a moment. 

:- It might go faster if I combine that research with teaching you about our world's magic? Even if you cannot yourself wield it, you might have useful thoughts: 

(This is maybe not how he would normally feel, or what he would normally recommend? Leareth isn't sure. It's confusing.) 

(Nayoki is definitely making a quiet mental note that Leareth would not normally try to pull a not-necessarily-trustworthy stranger from another world into his research process with this little consideration. She isn't surprised, at this point, but she's still unsure how it fits into the overall pattern - it's not just that Leareth is more trusting, it's more complicated than that...) 

:I understand and would be honored:

(That's actually not an accurate description of his feelings, which are much closer to "EEEEE!!!" than they are to "honored". Trying to understand how weird superpowers work in enough detail that he can mercilessly exploit them is one of his favorite hobbies.)

Awwwww. Sandor is kind of cute when he's happy. 

Leareth takes a deep breath. 

"- I think that I will need some time alone to - figure out how to function while my mind is like this. Nayoki can make a start on explaining Gates to you." 

Nayoki can do that, sure!

She absolutely does not trust this man! She is going to make sure that when Leareth figures out a Gate back to his world, at least half a dozen of their elite mages will be Gated to random locations before Sandor finds out about it. But, in the meantime, she is happy to lead Sandor off and explain whatever she can to him! 

And Sandor can learn more about Gates! Most of what he's thinking about is the uses for rapid transport, particularly at interstellar distances, but he's also worried about and - trying to not ask about or think about because he's a little worried just on general principles that the people reading his mind might find destroying worlds acceptable under circumstances where he wouldn't? - the prospect of opening Gates to sufficiently hostile environments that a brief connection to them would be massively destructive. He would like to learn how to make sure they do not do that, if he quietly can.

He's also curious if Nayoki knows if permanent Gate-transit makes it easier for gods to spread their influence; in particular, he's worried about the gods leaking into his universe if there's a permanent gate between Earth and Velgarth.

Nayoki has no idea! She's unsure of the answers to quite a lot of his questions, unfortunately; Leareth is the real expert, here. She can explain how basic Gates work, though: a threshold, a search-spell, a link through the Void between one place and another. It's one of the more challenging techniques in common usage; many other techniques are either high power or high complexity, but Gates are both. 

She also knows quite a lot about Gate-work that isn't generally considered possible, but that Leareth can nonetheless pull off. Gates built on thin air. Horizontal Gates to drop through. Gates to places he's never been, aiming the search using someone else's memory, or a map, or dead reckoning. Gates to underwater. Leareth can even manage Gates to underground, though this is rarely especially useful unless there's an inaccessible seam of some very rare substance that he wants to mine. 

Most of what she knows about Gating to hostile environments applies to other planes. You can Gate to the elemental planes, though you really shouldn't -  none of them are safe for humans, and you can operate there by sending a mental projection with your magic - but she doesn't think any but Fire is instantly destructive to whoever's in range on the material-plane side of the Gate. If you Gate to the deep ocean, you do get a lot of high-pressure water coming through, but not for very long; taking anything across a Gate slightly destabilizes it, which pulls more energy from the mage in order to keep the threshold together, and large amounts of mass are going to quickly drain a mage unconscious. You could flood an enclosed space that way, but not a city. 

You can, technically, raise a one-sided Gate directly to the Void. This very rapidly drains all the ambient mage-energies from an area, is almost certainly going to be fatal to the mage casting it, and is only useful as a weapon. Leareth thought you could design an artifact to do it, but hasn't actually attempted this. 

(Nayoki is totally reading Sandor's mind, but he's successfully avoiding thinking about whatever details he doesn't want to give them ideas on. Not that she expects them to be inclined to.) 

She has absolutely no idea on the gods question and apologetically says it'll have to wait for Leareth. 

He is grateful and impressed! If they want a ridiculous technological advantage over everyone else in their world he'd also be happy to provide; he thinks this is probably less time-dependent than his own issues but it is definitely worth doing at some point. How are Gates maintained long-term, does she know? If they can appear as a legal organization in his world instead of a criminal one, long-distance long-term Gates would be extremely useful for commercial transport and movement of goods, as well as their various military uses; they could rapidly accumulate quite a lot of money to use bribing and hiring people and advancing the industrial state of affairs of their own world (and fighting the gods). If people other than Leareth can Gate to other worlds (or Leareth can build permanent Gates to other worlds) it would also be much more efficient than any of his planet's existing means of interworld travel, which require building very expensive machines that either use humongous amounts of power and require superpower maintenance, or need to be largely rebuilt every time they're used. Making his civilization multiplanetary would do a lot to reduce the odds of it destroying itself in the near future.

(Also, though this is in the back of his mind, once interworld Gating becomes reliable, they're going to get that anyway, so situations in which it isn't worth it for him to immediately get them up to the 1993 standard will be very unlikely.)

Nayoki wants to do a lot more thinking, and not with Sandor in the room, before making a decision on how exactly they're going to approach his world. She probably doesn't want him to be in charge of it, and ideally wants him kept in the dark about at least some of their planning, so he has fewer opportunities to interfere, or just...steer in a direction that serves him and doesn't necessarily serve Leareth. 

(She's carefully not dwelling on that right now, including with the help of a couple of quick redirects on herself. Sandor is terrifyingly good at reading people, and while he's not stupid and can certainly guess what their incentives are here, Nayoki doesn't want to come across as hostile, not when there isn't yet a reason for it other than habitual paranoia. She does make a very quiet mental note to herself that this possibly means they should keep Leareth in the dark about some of their strategic planning, assuming he's functional enough for that to matter, and maybe keep him separated from Sandor...) 

It seems simpler in a lot of ways if they can pull off interfacing with his world as a legal organization! Though, of course, more constraining in other ways, and she needs to know more about what the actual constraints would be of operating within the law. Rapidly accumulating a lot of money seems like a good first step for a lot of plans; their current organization does have substantial resources, but ones accumulated over many centuries, Velgarth doesn't offer many routes for getting rich fast. 

(It's uncomfortable that, right now, she can't actually guess at what Leareth is going to want to do.) 

She doesn't have the slightest idea if it would be possible to Gate between other planets in the same material plane; his world probably isn't, and so it's more like a Gate to, say, the Elemental Plane of Air than one over a vast distance. Certainly no one alive in Velgarth right now, including Leareth, can Gate more than maybe a few thousand miles, if that. It would require inventing a new technique entirely. But, of course, Leareth is very good at that; it just might be delayed if it takes a long time to sort out the aftereffects of whatever attack hit him. 

He has a variety of suggestions for tests to do with Gating, once it's explained how it works, and possible ways to improve it; ninety-five percent of them are either impractical, flawed, or things that were brilliant insights six hundred years ago and standard training for everyone in Leareth's organization, but once he grasps it he theoretically that clearly provide shim with a working model of how it functions he can start testing.

As for the law - he's happy to begin explaining. Getting things done in comparatively functional nations requires either fitting neatly into an established category they already have rules for and following all the rules for that category, or exhaustively proving to several panels of both domain experts and non-domain-experts that the things you're doing can't hurt anyone no matter what, or proving that you qualify for exemptions to these tests (for which you want a team of highly expensive legal professionals); the other options are doing things in nonfunctional nations (which requires lots of bribes, but they might decide to seize everything you own instead, even after you bribe them), or doing everything in territory unclaimed by any nation, which means either frozen wastes that can't grow food or stretches of ocean near no coastline. There were legal changes in the largest and most important country a little over a decade ago that made getting exemptions easier and turned the penalties for not having them into a metaphorical slap on the wrist for the first offense, but you'd still have to stop until you got classified as safe. They might, however, be able to claim to be a sovereign nation; international law as it is enforced imposes very few limits on what nations can do inside their own territory (theoretically "attack other nations," "build doomsday devices," "work with famous international outlaws" and "massacre large parts of their population," but countries can often get away with them anyway if they have the right connections or it's impractical for their rivals to invade), and so they could get away with a lot if they could pull that off, plausibly even working with him.

His world doesn't offer routes for getting rich fast either, usually, unless you have valuable and unique powers. Then they sky's the limit.

He hopes Leareth recovers quickly. He wants to see his family again

Leareth may not be actually listening in on this conversation, but he, too, wants to recover quickly. He's not unaware of how much this will have disrupted Sandor's life, whether or not he knows the details, and - well, accident or not, it is his fault, and thus his responsibility. 

However, his well-meaning intention to sit down and properly think about what he needs to sort out in his head, in order to meet the bare minimum threshold of concentration he needs to re-derive his Gate-route - obviously the first priority, and a prerequisite for any further plans - is derailed by the fact that he is, at this point, utterly exhausted. 

He sits at his writing desk for a couple of minutes, staring blearily at a blank page, before admitting defeat and relocating to his bed. He'll just...sit here. For a few minutes. And think. He can take notes on his thoughts later, once he's rested a bit. 

...In about three minutes Leareth is, instead, fast asleep on top of the covers. 

- and, in hindsight rather predictably, after a few candlemarks of dreamless sleep he finds himself somewhere else entirely. In an icy wasteland, in fact, with an army at his back, and ahead, a passage with impossibly smooth, glassy walls - a place that really exists, even now, though in reality carefully hidden behind illusions. He chose to do it far in advance, so that any potential suspicion within Valdemar would have plenty of time to subside. Even though the signature of blood-magic, however unmistakeable, can be contained much more locally than drawing on node-energies from the web of magic that permeates everything. 

He did it more than twenty years before he would need it. Twenty years during which his plans could have entirely changed - and have, now, but it's still too late to retrieve the hundred or so lives that went into that construction effort. 

Leareth feels like throwing up. 

...And he's not alone here. He really should have thought through what to say, but he didn't, and he doesn't have the faintest idea where to start. An apology is owed, obviously, but - whatever's changed in his internal state and motivations, it doesn't interfere with remembering his past relationship with Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron. He's given the man no reason to trust him, and every reason to be suspicious, to see hidden motives in Leareth's words and actions...