[What?] he says, sleepily concerned. [What's going on? Um, let me get dressed...]

[We found an elf Bell. She is wrecked. She's got this bond thing that's like a cross between being daemons and being vampire mates and something else, with a dragon and a demonic Joker, and it makes them read her mind, and we have no prayer of getting her patched up if they can't stop, but we tried sending her through Downside and as soon as she woke up it was back, and we tried wishing it away outright but that broke the dragon.]

"I can find nothing in her mindscape, so I could attempt nothing there - it doesn't block me, it's simply empty."

"If Isibel has opacity it's not very good opacity. We could - theoretically - edit her. But no," says Stella, "I think she'd rather just sleep forever. Or would if she were still whole and was looking at her choices."

"Editing the bond to not incorporate mindreading, even with half a dozen backup channels between the demon and dragon, flips the dragon off like a lightswitch," says Juliet. "But if we could just incorporate some kind of - filter, gate, toggle, something to give control to Isibel - but we don't know how the bond works, that's what you're here for, we don't want to wreck the demon-dragon-unit again in the process of trying to help Isibel, she loves them."

"...It should be possible," says Lazarus. "But you'd have to be careful about it. Maybe I should be the one to make the wish. Everything in there," he gestures to the dragon's head, "is very - sensitive. Intricate. Tangly. This bond thing is fascinating, I'd be excited if it weren't so tragic."

"What kinda coin do you need?" asks Stella.

"I'm not sure," he says. "Let's say hex."

"I'm not sure what kind of flexibility there is to edit this thing. What can you do?" Stella asks, extracting a hex from her aura. "Bare minimum she has to be able to think and keep them out at the same time; the exact design beyond that matters less."

"If you give me parameters everyone can agree on, I can probably implement them," he says. "The tricky part isn't that a lot of things are impossible, it's that anything is complicated."

"Pushing thoughts only on purpose like in a Sue-link is probably the best mix of privacy and the kind of - intimacy, communicability, that she might want again when she's got anything left to push," Aegis says.

"I assume there's no reason to block her from reading anything she likes in you?" Shell Bell asks the demon-and-dragon.

"Of course not," says the dragon. "But she should be able to look away when she wants to." The demon nods.

"So," says Lazarus, "how about this: a symmetrical barrier between her and the rest of you, where anyone can choose to 'speak' and anyone can choose to 'listen' but information only crosses the circle when those are both happening on the appropriate sides?"

Demon and dragon both nod.

"I can tell when Sue's 'knocking'," Aegis says. "And he can tell when I'm reaching for him. Will they be able to do something like that?"

"Oh, yes," he says, nodding. "Of course."

"Can anyone else think of anything else?"

"This is - obviously - less of a problem when she's asleep than when she's awake - but she should not, so to speak, 'talk in her sleep' - the actual talking doesn't matter, if she does it at all -" Isibel has in fact been quiet in her sleep for moonturns now - "but she shouldn't broadcast dreams unintentionally."

"And she should be able to wake me when I am sleeping," says the dragon.

"Okay," says Lazarus. "So - sending to sleeping people works, listening to sleeping people doesn't?"

"Unless the demon-and-dragon want her to be able to watch them dream."