That'd make sense, sure.

He fidgets and glances at the window. "I should go soon. I have a meeting, with Lancir. Probably right before your meeting. Tran's going to come help you find the way?" 

Yeah. I could probably find it again but I can't tell time.

"Oh. Right. I could... Actually that's probably one of those things that takes way longer to explain that I think." Vanyel shrugs. "I usually ask my Companion when I want to know what time it is anyway. We have time-candles but they're only accurate to within a few minutes on the candlemark. There's the bell, it rings a certain number of times depending on when in the day. And there are lots of sundials on the Palace grounds and they get adjusted based on the time of year. I can explain it more later if you want, or someone else could." 

He gulps the rest of his tea and escapes. 

Huh.

She writes, while she's waiting for Tantras.

Tran arrives a few hours later, at a time that is pretty plausibly about an hour to noon. "Bella! Good morning. You had breakfast? Excellent." He seems to be in a rush. "Come, this way." 

Fortunately her boots still work, so she can keep up with him.

They make it to Lancir's office without incident. He looks less harried this morning, and smiles warmly at her. "Bella. Thank you for coming. Settled in all right? I'm curious how you're finding everything so far." He slides a teapot toward her. "Tea?" 

No thank you, had some with breakfast. Everyone's been very hospitable.

"That's good. You spoke to Savil last night, no? As I'm sure she mentioned, Valdemar is traditionally a safe haven for anyone who needs it, to the extent that we can be – it's why King Valdemar called his capital 'Haven'. So you'd be welcome here no matter what, if you wished to stay. However, I'm sure she also mentioned why we're especially excited about having someone with your particular talents." 

Lancir sits back, and refills his own teacup. "It's especially of interest to me because, among my many other roles, I have the Mindhealing Gift, which is probably our world's closest analogue to what your subtle arts can do. There are, I understand, a total of six of us including myself currently in Valdemar. It's been obvious for a while that we need more resources in that direction, so if you're willing to help, that would mean a lot." 

Oh, you're a therapist!

"...I suppose so, yes." He shrugs. "It's less of an institution here than what you describe in your world. Mainly I play that role for Heralds when it comes up, since I'm already familiar with, well, a lot of the reasons why our lives are the way they are. I guess it goes with the rest of the role of Queen's Own – I'm Elspeth's right hand and her closest friend in some ways, but I'm also responsible for keeping an eye on her Heralds, making sure everyone is managing. Easier at some times than others. Sometimes I find myself wishing there were six of me." 

In Arda since there was only the one of me, once they realized it was a useful practice some people were thinking of trying to take up a purely mundane version.

"...I wish that was possible but I'm not sure how it would work. It's a brilliant idea if it does, though. Did the world you came from have schools for a mundane equivalent as well, or just for the subtle arts version?" He shakes his head. "Gods, I wish you'd gotten the books across somehow. I try to imagine writing a book about what I do, and I can't think how I'd describe it in a way that would come across."

Subtle arts isn't uncommon in Materia, so a therapist career is in fact gated on it there, but it seemed like it might work in a population without that option. A lot of it is just talking, even if the arts effects are more dramatic when they're called for. I can try to write down what I remember from the books.

"That would be incredibly valuable to us, I think. I've already alerted Healers' and asked them to hunt down their nearest Mindhealer to talk with you – I think they're out on circuit. Since they're not here yet, though, I'll jump to the front of the line for sharing ideas with you. I haven't had nearly as many opportunities as I'd prefer to ask advice, much less ask someone who has books on it." 

He frowns, thinking. "Hmm. I guess I do plenty of work that isn't actively using my Gift, and even some without my Sight. Feels hard to manage entirely without, though." 

Well, some things would be impossible, yes. Though maybe you can do things with magic I can't do at all and vice-versa, so we could fill each other in that way.

"Hmm. That's a good idea. I'll try to start." He's silent for a while, rubbing his chin. "Well, I can See the...structure, I guess, of people's minds. Kind of how the various patterns fit together. It's different for everyone, but for me it's like a metaphorical house. Rooms, doors, windows, pillars, all that. I can look at it overall or I can try to go in closer and See more details in a given area. It's all pretty abstract, though, so to interpret it, helps a lot to ask questions." 

He starts doodling absently around the edges of what looks like a handwritten accounting report with some corrections in red ink. "Then, I can push and move things around. I've caught up with other Mindhealers a couple of times, enough to get on the same page with terminology – two of the main techniques are called blocks and redirects. A redirect is a single thread of thought that I can...bake in deeper, I guess...with my Gift, usually to try to replace some other thought that's harming the person. So if a patient has problems feeling guilty in a certain kind of situation, say, I can remind them in a session to be gentle with themselves, and if I want I can push with my Gift to make it stick, so they'll keep remembering it in the relevant times and places." 

"Blocks are more... Hmm, so if there's an entire region of thoughts that's bad, often it's a kind of loop that someone will get stuck in, that'll show up in my Sight. And I can sort of...put a wall around it. It's not an impermeable wall, minds don't work that way, but it'll often keep them from wandering there by accident. Not sure how to describe it any better than that." 

He sits back again. "Is that anything like what your subtle arts do?" 

Those both sound similar to things I can do, yes. I wound up seeing in Arda a lot of effects downstream of people having been tortured and enslaved by an evil god so most of my experience is with panic attacks, nightmares, flashbacks.

"That sounds awful!" Lancir almost knocks over his tea. "Savil said your world sounded perfect, but...gods." He makes a face. "Literally. Sorry. Anyway, I see some amount of that too, for different reasons obviously, although probably the most common thing I have to address is people feeling horrifically guilty for screwing up in a mission or circuit and people being harmed as a result." 

He straightens the papers on his desk. "Anyway, were you able to figure out anything that worked really well? I've got one patient in particular I could use your advice with, for those sorts of issues and other things. Basically, something really bad happened to him, and... I don't know. It doesn't seem like putting in blocks around it is enough, or even the right tactic to be taking, but I don't know what else to do." 

The evil god is in prison now and that was pretty much it for bad stuff.

Uh, some people like to forget outright, I don't know if you can do that? I also have a thing where I can run somebody through a memory with all the interesting content and feelings elided till the mind stops making a fuss about it, like if you're flashing back to the time the orc chased you to the edge of a cliff and you broke your leg, you give it an overlay of "the time nothing in particular caused you for no reason in particular to be nowhere in particular and then nothing in particular happened".

"Huh!" Lancir puts his hands up behind his head. "Fascinating. No, I can't make people outright forget, at least not without breaking a lot of other things in the process – closest I can come in practice is making it so memories don't come up very often. The second thing... Hmm. I can't do that with my Gift alone, possibly if I had Projective Empathy as well – or Bardic – I could do something similar but I don't think it'd be as fine-grained."

He gets out a bit of paper and scribbles something. "Out of curiosity, how much can you see the patient's responses during, in real time? One of the really irritating parts is that I'm not a strong Thoughtsenser, so if I'm seeing someone who shields well by default, I get the overall shape but none of the specifics of what they're thinking." 

I can follow quite a lot but usually I make do with just an affect read - that's receptive empathy, I'm not sure what category that falls under for you guys. The exact timing of the changes matters more than the verbal details, usually, I can ask the patient to produce verbal details if they matter but it's often hard to remember timing from inside.

"...That's the same thing for us but it's a separate Gift, usually comes with projective Empathy but not always, and I don't have it either." He looks vaguely envious. "Thoughtsensing alone does give some overtones that convey affect. I think I agree with you on exact timing of changes mattering; I can generally pick that up but it's intuition as much as anything else. Or I can prod a bit with my Gift and see what kind of response it causes, figure out what's going on." 

Prod a bit? Prod what?