Melody spends a while peering around the garden. "That's – huh! It's...not exactly like it's all grey or something, I just – can't? Doesn't mean anything? That is so odd. I'm going to try to figure out how you did that." She turns her Sight on herself; it's not any impaired by the color agnosia. "...I have no idea how you did it. I assume you changed something but whatever it is, my Gift doesn't think it's obvious. Possibly I could find it if I spent two hours picking through every thread but I don't want to bore you." 

She pours herself more tea and stares at the teapot with an expression of baffled curiosity for a while. "...Ooh, idea. Can you see blocks? Lance mentioned that might be an issue. If you'd like, I can do a really obvious one on myself and we can poke at how it shows up to your senses." 

Sure, that's a good idea. And I can leave the color agnosia as long as you want if you want to pick at it, and it'll probably come off by itself in two or three days.

"Let's do that. I can survive a few days not being able to see colours, not like I need to worry about making clothes match." She tugs ruefully at her Healers' robes. "All right. I'm going to do a directional block – that means it's mainly preventing a particular cluster of thought-patterns from associating to the area I'm blocking, not trying to block that area from everything. Basically, this one will mean that other children don't remind me of my own as much – I used to use it on myself working with littles, to make that less distracting, it's awful working with children who've been hurt and it's worse if I'm imagining mine in their position. Anyway, I can do it and put it back quickly because I've had practice. You can watch through my Sight if you like." 

And if Bella does she'll see a number of threads in the weft, headed in the same direction and of the same colour, crossing from one section of the pattern to another – and now they're pulled back in unison and the free ends fastened in something like a knot, which goes back in the area that the threads originated.

Looking at it like it's threads how did you know what to change?

"...For this one I just have it memorized, also it's my mind – I can tap a thread and sort of just feel it, or I can concentrate on the thought or feeling and see where the tapestry lights up. Er, if I'm doing it on someone else I haven't seen before, I do something a bit like you did before, prompt them through focusing on different bits. If they're struggling with that, I can directly use my Gift to poke it a bit – it doesn't move or change anything but they can report what it brings up for them. I'd take at least a candlemark to map everything out before attempting the actual block, and then I'd be slow and careful, only move a few threads at a time."

"And this is a..." she pauses, searches for words, "...a sharper block than I'd generally do for long-term? I prefer to move as little as possible, weave things smoothly back into a sensible place instead of tying it off. That part's pretty noticeable from the inside, it sort of flips my thoughts around and it's a bit disorienting. If someone's really in a short-term crisis I can do it quick and dirty, guess and grab a bunch of threads, I can break someone out of psychotic delusions that way but it's very impairing and I'd never leave it longer than I had to." 

Nod nod.

"...What does it look like to your subtle arts?" 

The block? Uh - She goes and finds it. Not all that different from one of my "pinches", just kind of sideways and... knotted instead of glued.

"Can I hop on your senses again and see?" 

Yeah, here you go.

"Hmm. I see what you mean about the, um, sideways. That's the thing I dislike about blocks. It doesn't just undo there being an unhelpful association there, it just yanks it onto a different pathway. If it's not carefully done – and sometimes if it is – people can get caught in loops, they start heading down the association-thread and bounce off but end up somewhere that leads back to it again, and they can be stuck there for a while, it's very unpleasant." 

She fidgets with her sleeve again. "What if I undo this one, and you show me how you'd do the same thing using your arts? I'm very curious." 

Yeah, sure.

Melody concentrates and undoes it. It goes a bit slower but she's still done in a minute or so. "Ready." 

Pinch!

"...That sure is something." Melody closes her eyes. "It is smoother. There's...if I poke at it, there's, you know that feeling where you see a place and it feels like you should recognize it but you don't quite? Or like you've seen it before in dreams and it's not quite real? There's a tiny bit of something like that, but only if I'm really digging for it, if I were letting my mind wander I don't think it'd be too noticeable." 

She flips to her Sight, Bella can look if she wants. :How odd. You've sort of...pinned it down, where the threads would cross over to the association? But very neatly, and I think you've shifted something – something that's deeper than my Sight can see. If I do push and follow that, I run into the pinned bit and it feels odd, but it sort of takes active effort to do that. Like my mind already knows that thread doesn't go anywhere interesting so why bother. I don't think that's a change I can make in a single session, much less in two minutes: 

This is a temporary version, I haven't glued it and won't just for a demo.

:No, I can see – it's not too stuck in there, I think I could nudge it loose with my Gift if I wanted. If you do glue something properly, can you undo it again later or is it really permanent?: 

I can... affect it like it originally grew in the pinched state. I can't cleanly undo it.

Melody drops her Sight. "For me it's a matter of how hard I push my Gift. I also won't do that for a demo, on myself or you, but I can kind of soften the whole substrate. If I tease some threads out and put them in a new place, and then I just throw a bunch of my Gift at it...then everything goes soft and malleable enough that it sort of settles and smoothes and balances itself out. And then there's no way I'm getting it back to exactly the way it was before. I can do it to varying degrees, though. Make a block that'll gradually slip back to the previous state in a few days, or one that'll last a month." 

She sits back and tugs at her hair. "I wish I knew what minds were made of. What my Gift is actually doing in there. Gemma can test Healing on mice, work out a technique in theory and then try it and see if it does what she thinks it ought. I...don't really have an ethical way of doing that." 

Even if you don't mind killing the mice that sounds dangerous.

“...What, the way Gemma does it? Er, Healing isn’t like mage-work, it doesn’t backlash on her or anything if something fails. Although she does sometimes kill the mice.”

Melody grimaces. “She’s got a strong stomach - she bled a mouse to death once just to watch with her Sight and see if she was right about something or other with how the vessels and heart react to blood loss. I’ve had to ban her from telling me about those kinds of tests, I’m a little more squeamish.”

So she's doing experiments?

“Yes, that’s the unfair part I’m complaining about!” Melody makes a face and tugs at her sleeve again. “She can break things on purpose to see what happens, work back from there to the role an organ plays in the body when it’s functioning normally - I can’t do that unless it’s minor enough to risk trying it on myself or Gemma, and I had a scare back when I was twenty so I’m pretty cautious about that nowadays.”

Would you characterize the thing she is doing as 'science'?

“...Er, can you clarify what you mean by that? I’m...confused about what concept you mean.”