Oh well thank goodness. "Thank you," she says, "I would really appreciate it." And then, in a bit of a torrent, since he seems to be receptive to this sort of thing, at least, she continues, "It's not just that, though. Looking through my eyes and ears without asking me first, reading whatever plans I have out of my mind, setting up emergency alerts without telling me, and while they're much less invasive and I understand why you need them," especially since he passed along the thoughts from doing so, "It would be better if, at the very least, the one that lets me get your attention wasn't based off reading my emotions and thoughts but rather a voluntary button I can press. Which I could have suggested, if you'd asked in the first place. I understand why you're wary of me. But please, stop treating my brain as something you can just do with as you will, respect my privacy, to at least a reasonable degree, under the circumstances," she clicks the pen a couple times and breathes, "and we'll have a much easier time of things. Alright?" 

...he frowns slightly, considering. "I'm—hmm. Yeah. Okay. I still want something that'll alert me if something happens to you that doesn't give you time to react, but yeah. —I don't wanna talk about magic over phone or text or anything, that's probably more paranoid than I need to be but I feel like being really really paranoid, so maybe I should figure out a way for us to talk by magic that's less of a mess than the stuff I've tried so far, so I can ask about that kind of thing if anything else comes up, or you can get in touch with me when you want? But I can fix the emergency alert before we worry about that."

"Being paranoid, under the circumstances, is probably not the worst idea." She has no idea if there's any way for whoever did... that to her to track her down again. She doesn't want to find out. "We can try and work something out. An alert for when something happens to me is fine, but desiring to contact you should be voluntary, not accidental. But the important part is to ask, in general, here. Please." 

She takes another breath. "Thank you for the consideration." She wants to press him about Valerie, but he didn't say anything when she mentioned it just now, and she has no good reason to believe that he'll listen to anything she has to say on that topic. She's sure he knows her feelings on the matter, antagonizing him about it is unlikely to do anyone any good. "As for communication, I expect there's some way you can set things up for us to volunteer thoughts to one another, rather than simply reading each other's minds. And that way we can send only what we want to send, without having to send everything, which if you do have so much trouble communicating in words, seems like it would be a reasonable alternative. Some kind of intentional telepathy." Which. she supposes, is probably a good way to test some of the extent of what his mental powers can do. 

"Okay. I can try that." He hesitates a moment. "Want me to?"

"I think we might want to be a little bit more intentional about the design of it, first," Dani says. "But thank you for asking. Do you have a good idea for how you want it to work?" 

"Not exactly. I think maybe—"

He winces abruptly.

"—one sec—"

The feeling, when he pauses to unpack it, goes something like this:

What's he doing, treating her like this? It's one thing to uphold his responsibility, to uphold his integrity, to pay attention to incentives, but this? This is just—weakness, unrepentant unmitigated weakness. He owns her and he's hearing her concerns like she has power over him, he's giving her power over him, how fucking dare he act like she's his—friend or something—

He takes a deep breath. Okay. Now is the time that he deals with this, apparently:

No.

No, he's not listening.

That is not the life he wants to live, that is not the person he wants to be, that is not the power he wants to wield, no. Absolutely the fuck not. He is gonna keep right on treating Dani with respect and consideration and kindness, as a friend (or at least an uneasy ally) and not a slave, as well as he can and as well as he can learn to do better, and his fucked-up moral compass can go piss in a lake, he's done letting himself be ruled by the impulse to feel ashamed of mercy.

"...sorry, just—had a thought," he says, refocusing on the outside world and glancing up at her face. "I can show you if you want, I'm not really... sure how to say it."

Dani clicks her pen a few times, curious and confused. There isn't anything particularly wrong with communicating this way, she supposes, as least as necessary. "Sure," she says, "if you think it's relevant to share, then by all means." 

So he gives it to her, in as much depth and clarity as he can manage.

Well that's a perspective. There's something very twisted and wrong and vile about how he sees the world, or saw it. Trying to make her happy, trying to cooperate as a weakness and not simple basic human decency is despicable. 

But he makes the right choice. Or at least, a right choice. He chooses to discard, or put aside his messed-up morals (ashamed of mercy, really?), and try to grow and act like and become a better person. 

Dani's a little worried that he might be showing this to her just to earn her trust -- it does, in fact, mean that he's making changes in a positive direction, and therefore she does feel like she trusts him more because of such an epiphany. But it doesn't make sense for him to be lying to her, here -- he could just make her act or believe anything he wanted anyways. So it's not likely to be any sort of ploy. 

"That's... an interesting but ultimately positive thought," she tells him. "Thank you for sharing." She pauses. "So you had ideas for a non-invasive telepathic link?" 

"Yeah, before I got distracted. Uh—the simplest version might be... kind of an extended version of the better emergency alert? Where—the better emergency alert is, instead of 'when you want my attention I know that', 'when you try to get my attention on purpose I know that'—but then just... anything you're trying to send on purpose comes through, and the other way around. And, huh, if that works it'll be convenient cause then my eyes won't glow whenever I start sending you stuff."

"That's something like what I had in mind, yes," Dani says. "I think I originally would have at least preferred a way to shut you out, if you were being persistent or distracting, but I expect at this stage you'll actually listen to me if I tell you to stop. And you could work around it regardless, of course. Anything intentionally sent on purpose goes through seems like the right approach." 

"Yeah," he says. "It's—I don't think I can give you a way to shut me out that works if I don't feel like letting it. But... I can still give you one, if you think it'd be easier to use it than to tell me to fuck off?"

"If you can put one in, sure. But if not, expect as long as you're reasonably polite, it'll be fine." 

He nods. "Okay. Should I try it, then?"

Dani gives him a small smile. "By all means." 

He thinks about it—replacing the 'wants his attention' part of the emergency-alert read with this two-way voluntary sharing—and his eyes flare gold, and he says, "Okay, try sending me something."

Dani tries to send him, "Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3." 

And—without eyeglow—he sends back a wordless sense of yep that worked.

"Okay, cool," he says."So that's that taken care of. For the rest of the emergency alert thing—do you have better ideas for how to make sure I find out about it if something happens to you that doesn't give you time to call for help? Knowing whether you're conscious and whether you're scared seems like it mostly works but I feel like there's got to be a better plan, I just haven't thought of it."

Dani pauses for a little while to think. Being afraid is a generally good indicator, she has to admit. Still, she'd rather he not be listening in to her being afraid all of the time. She'd really rather he not listen in on her at all, but she's not sure how to do that and be safe -- any spike of fear or anything, if she's ever caught by... whoever that was, again, is useful. Though she supposes he'll always be able to find her after the fact. Hm. 

"Is there any way you can, as long as you don't have it turned on all the time, know where I am? So you can come find me if you need to." 

"...huh," he says. "Yeah, good idea. Not sure if I can or not, but I can try it—?"

"Please. Better to know for sure now." 

Okay.

The first thing he tries—placing her on a kind of mental map—doesn't work, and he has a suspicion about why. Dani is in his power, but the space she moves through mostly isn't, unless she happens to visit his car again someday. He can't place her on a map because he can't make the map.

So he tries again, and this time aims to know her location relative to himself—and that works, a flash of gold and a little mental Dani-compass with an intuitive sense of distance.

"Yeah, looks like I can," he reports. "Good thinking. I should have that on Valerie too, just in case." His eyes flare again.

"Please don't have it turned on for me unless you need it!" Dani says. She also sighs a little at the mention of Valerie. Testing it on Valerie is good experimentation, of course, but she still is annoyed that he's keeping a slave and is using her for sex, even if she seems to like it (while mind controlled) or that he's trying to treat her somewhat better.

"Honestly it doesn't do a good enough job of telling me where you are that I'd be worried about privacy if I were you, like, I could find you but I'd have to look, but yeah, I can keep it off most of the time."

And he notices that sigh. He really definitely notices that sigh. He hesitates for a moment longer before saying, "I kind of want to ask what your problem is with Valerie but I don't know if that's something we can, like, actually manage to talk about? But I guess there's only one way to find out."

Dani clicks her pen a couple more times and sighs. "I'm not so sure we can reasonably either. You seem to be rather attached to keeping her as she is, so that you can use her however you desire, whenever you want, even though what you've done to her and what you're doing to her is wrong. I'm not sure I'd be able to convince you of this, though, and it doesn't seem like something you want to give up. So," she spreads her hands, "I don't know that there's much we can do. The fact that you're not going to go about hurting any new people or keeping them against their will is enough, for now at least."