That's uncomfortable to even contemplate, Addy finds the crispness and clarity of sensation to be one of the most important things, she's modified her mind and senses to increase that. "That's awful. I think if I was building telepathy from scratch I'd want it to be something like..." She imagines a sorta sense of where nearby people are relative to her and approximately what they're feeling. Then she imagines reaching out and opening up a person's thoughts with a clear distinction between what is and is not thoughts. "Would that be good?"

"Maybe."

"I can try to assemble that for myself if you're comfortable with me having telepathy, so you'd have some sense of what that would be like." She's also considering asking someone else to come over and limiting the telepathy to exclude River if that would make her more comfortable. Also Emma is better at making telepathy powers specifically.

"I don't mind people reading my mind."

"Alright, I'll give it a try then." Addy first reaches out to Emma and leaves a note indicating that she's experimenting with her mind. She gets back a wordless acknowledgement. Then Addy creates a checkpoint for her mind.

With both of those safety measures complete she starts to build the new sense, she reaches into a library of sorts inside her mind and finds a directional sense she played with previously and unpacks and fiddles with it to indicate where people are. She adds a second overlay to that sense that will translate people's emotions into colors. She leaves the inputs to that hanging for a moment.

She reached out into a collective memory of sorts for the vague outline of a telepathy power. The outline handles identifying people's minds and making them available to have things done with that information. She digs into that outline and finds a hook for people's emotional state and attaches that to the sense she's building. Finally she finds hooks for verbal and visual thoughts and ties them into visual and auditory overlays of the sort that can be seen/heard through and ties them to a mental trigger.

With the power complete she runs it through a safety check she pulls from the collective memory and then finally grafts it onto her mind with a time limit of half an hour.

Immediately she can feel River's position relative to her.

River's curious about what Addy's doing, and rapidly assimilating it into other things she's learned. She's considering how she wants her telepathy to work. She should be able to turn every part of it off, sometimes...

Addy opens up her read of River, it doesn't seem to cause a feedback loop thankfully. She's glad she's provided a model for River to work from.

Her mind isn't a library, neatly organized and labeled - it's an ever shifting storm, a river of color and light and sound, and everyone in the world is part of the same waterway and their minds are like ripples -

Her mind is a vortex. It's a contained storm system, and she can spin it up into its own little shell, protected, or she can reach out, brush other people's ripples...

That's a little overwhelming but it's also super cool.

She's glad Addy likes it!

Addy plays around a little with her new power making tweaks around the edges to how it presents and exactly how it feels trying to make it just right. She's planning to keep it for a while.

River keeps playing at well, adjusting until she can shut off all her telepathy, or only parts of it, or until she can get only part of someone's thoughts.

Addy is glad her example is proving helpful.

And River turns off her telepathy, and her head's quiet, it's just her own thoughts for the first time in a year - 

She starts laughing.

Addy smiles widely, and closes off her read on River. It seems more polite that way.

"Is it always like this?"

"I stopped reading your mind, I can start again if you want. If you mean is the dreamscape always this convenient then yes."

"And - things being quiet. I'd... Forgotten."

"That too. I think you held up pretty well but nobody should be subjected to that."

"Yeah."

"We'll get you out. Nobody will ever be able to do that to you again."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"So where do we start?"

"I should probably introduce you to Libby, she's been doing research on your world. I don't know what she's found out as of yet but it's probably helpful for planning. If nothing else, she'll have read through the records of the people holding you at this point."