"All right, now you've called me that once and gotten it out of the way, you can call me Randi from now on. And - hmm. You are a pretty unusual case. I wanted to start with - tell me a bit about yourself? We do know a lot of your background but that's not the same as hearing it from you." 

:You got it: Amshalan sends after twenty seconds of tweaking. :I'm listening: 

"Oh thank you I appreciate that. Randi. Uh, I was born about eight candlemarks from here, place called Fork Village, but my parents split up when I was a baby and I lived in Haven after that until I convinced my mother to move me somewhere else because, uh, I had debilitating nightmares about being Chosen. ...Amshalan and I are fine but that's, like, an index value of how I feel about mind-affecting magic in the general case however much of it I currently happen to be toting around. My mother picked Rethwellan, we moved there, I did very well in school, went to university, as of a few months back had a research position at the University of Petras studying and teaching microbiology with a focus in infectious disease with a view to eradicating some illnesses entirely down the road. There was an explosion in one of the mage student buildings; Leareth happened to be around for unrelated reasons, shielded me and another bystander, but got pretty banged up himself in the process. I'm a Healer and a Fetcher, I picked him up and brought him to the Healers' building. I don't normally see patients, partly to specialize in research and partly because Healing-melds give me panic attacks, but I stayed with him - I rationalized that at the time as expecting the clinicians to be busy with other casualties of the explosion and spread thin but in retrospect it was probably the nascent lifebond. We noticed that was happening independently later, after I'd already spent too much time around him to nip it in the bud. I got pulled into the shared dream thing. Leareth stayed with me in Petras for a while and then I moved into his, uh, place, and then things got crazy here and we thought it would help mitigate the fallout if I were present as a costly signal of willingness to negotiate in good faith and also to cut down on message latency compared to random brief dreams with one specific guy or logistically complicated letters. So here I am."

Randi nods slowly. "The explosion that led to you spending many candlemarks in close quarters with Leareth. That seems rather convenient, or - something, anyway." 

"...well, yes, as you may know lifebonds are generally purposeful divine intervention and I don't think it would suit most lifebond-related plans for the intended principals to detect the incipient soul-gluing and immediately flee town so of course when someone contrived to lifebond us additional assurances were required."

"Huh." He seems more intrigued than uncomfortable. "I imagine there were some events in between recognizing the lifebond and, er, meeting Vanyel in the dream; you don't have to say if you prefer not to, of course, but I'm so curious what it must've been like, finding out all the things about Leareth's life - lives, rather. Obviously you've come around to his, well, position on things. I can't imagine you started out there. One could posit the lifebond making you, but from what I've heard you're very stubborn." 

"It was a process, yes. Though it might be faster than you're imagining, I kind of pick things up and keep going even if they're very startling, and lifebonds do seem to require some underlying compatibility so it wasn't as alien as it might have been. At first I thought he was probably delusional when he was claiming to be two thousand years old and so on; once I bought that part he gradually told me more and more; I think I'm now pretty filled in on the broad strokes of all the things I have the expertise to understand which matter to me, though obviously there are reams of details that are either too technical or not relevant enough to have come up in the time we've had together, which in the grand scheme of things hasn't been long, and it's possible something ought to have mattered to me which didn't spring to mind in that span. The specific facts on the ground are some of them still secret so I can't be very exact in relating to you how it all happened but suffice it to say that I do think I was persuaded by actual argumentation. I retain the ability to disagree with him and to criticize his ideas. He takes it well."

Randi nods. Seems to absorb that for a while. 

"I want to hear your impression of the Heralds involved here," he says finally. "As an outsider showing up in Haven. I imagine it was a very surreal couple of days for you." His lips twitch. "Don't worry about offending me, please." 

"I liked Dara a lot, but I suppose she's no longer within the scope of that question.

Uh, I also like Vanyel but less in a 'he impressed me' way and more in a 'I want to hug him' way. The fact that Tantras appeared to despise me distracted me somewhat from other traits he may have but I make some allowances for the awkwardness of his Companion situation, which must suck. Savil seems neat when she isn't being made terribly uncomfortable by my making heretical remarks and going all quiet. I don't have much impression of the others, they didn't talk as much. As a group they... didn't, uh... cope well with shock or confusion, it looked kind of like there wasn't an understood process for dealing with it? Maybe there usually is and you're in it and your being tired and trying not to meet with me personally disrupted it but there really should be a backup process if that's the case. So yesterday evening they were all doing their impression of bickering chickens and I was concerned they'd pitch me through a Gate without further attempt to repair the communication breakdown and then we would have a war and that would be bad, so I talked to Amshalan and neither of us had a better idea for keeping them talking than her giving me her stamp of approval, as it were."

"Tran is...complicated, right now," Randi says tiredly. "And - hmm. I think you came away with a bit of an unfair impression of them. It doesn't help that I've been hanging back, and of course the fact that this entire situation is unprecedented and very sudden and weird and scary. But, well, we've been invaded before. Dara being repudiated was earthshaking. There've only been a handful of repudiations in our entire history, never a Monarch's Own before, and...she didn't do anything, right, it - that's a kind of shock and confusion that we don't have any process for dealing with. Because the way Valdemar is built as a kingdom, our process kind of is the Companions." 

"I have noticed this about your process."

"...It seems as though the fact that this is our process is kind of problematic right now." 

"I have noticed that about your process too."

"I'd ask if you have ideas but, er, I'm concerned any ideas to help would themselves run into the problematic part." 

"I wasn't planning to blunder into it as though drunk, but, yes, I obviously wasn't being careful enough with Dara and there's probably some risk even pulling way back and taking only smaller steps. There are some serious obstacles and I don't know how it will wind up being best to address them but I have ideas for first steps."

"Oh?" 

"So -

- uh, is your Companion eavesdropping right now, that's going to affect how often I have to stop and check in with how they're coping with everything."

"No, she isn't. I'm not a very strong Mindspeaker so it's difficult to relay everything to her and also focus on a conversation; she can help out by boosting me in emergencies but she isn't right now." 

"Okay. So. Obviously, if Dara got the ideas that so offended Rolan from me, you would think Amshalan would have the same problem.

She did for about fifteen minutes and then she didn't and now she's fine.

I think that - while that's almost certainly going to be on the high end of good outcomes - most Companions will be more like Amshalan than like Rolan -

- and also that Yfandes and Vanyel are in a bad way and they can't go backwards and given that might as well serve as experimental subjects, as it were."

Randi stares at her for a good minute.

"From what I've heard," he says finally, "you're right, Van and Yfandes are doing very badly. And you seem not to be having the same issue. Er, I would usually go to the Groveborn with this, but I'm less sure Rolan will have helpful things to say, given the givens." 

"You should be aware that he isn't a big fan of what Amshalan did to reconcile herself with me, and was bothering her about it this morning. She was getting a legitimate Call and just put it off till I asked for her, but I think he's currently kind of - confused and not able to think very clearly and will not be a good source of guidance on this subject."

"...This is very awkward. I should probably try to figure out what the other Companions think of it, if he's giving them advice - if it's terrible advice... Gods!" He yanks at his hair, frustrated. "I'm sorry, just, I swear I mostly know how to be a King in general but - I feel so unqualified to make decisions about this bizarre mess we're in." 

"It's really out of scope compared to what you would have been educated for, I get that. Hm - I'm trying to come up with a term for Amshalan-style Companions who've broken through the - obstacle to thought - that Rolan probably can't break through because I think he may be made of a much higher percentage thought-obstacles than the rest of them. ...'jailbroken'? Amshalan is jailbroken. It took her fifteen minutes and she said 'ow' a few times and that was that. I think Rolan probably cannot get jailbroken. It's possible Companions without Heralds can't be jailbroken; it's likely Companions whose Heralds are suspicious of the process themselves can't go through with it; while I think Rolan is more exceptional than Amshalan, Amshalan is still unusual in several ways that probably made it easier for her, and I can't absolutely guarantee that anybody else trying to jailbreak their Companion won't wind up like Dara. I think Vanyel's choices are probably to try to jailbreak Yfandes - we'll help - or to keep avoiding her forever, though. And I think that anybody with a non-jailbroken Companion is going to be really limited in their ability to cope with the situation at hand."

That gets a very cross-eyed look from Randi. 

"I feel like possibly breaking thought-barriers on all of our Companions against the will of the Groveborn is going to cause some problems," he says finally. "Like, I don't know, maybe attracting divine attention." 

"So, I think there is already some divine attention flying around and actually one of my main hypotheses here is that the Companions were designed by committee and the gods on that committee were in accord hundreds of years ago and currently aren't. Major events that brought me here to this situation - the lifebond, the dream, Amshalan's Call - all obviously involve a god's thumb on the scales, and haven't taken long enough to unfold to be likely to have gotten perturbed from their original plan. I can't tell you that I'm sure whoever's orchestrating that expects us to have really smooth sailing, but it looks like we have already attracted divine attention."