"...I suppose it is not intrinsically unpleasant. Just distracting. And - I generally dislike having emotions that I did not decide to feel. This does not happen very often! I...will get used to it, I suppose."

Maybe it'll be less distracting if they do the, well, physical intimacy things. On the other hand that might make it worse. Also it seems like it would get in the way of finishing this conversation, which is important, and...aaaaugh now he is blushing ferociously. 

Belrun starts giggling. "Not right here this very minute, at any rate!"

Oh no she is adorable when she giggles. Focus focus focus. 

"...Did you have other items on the list of things that you find romantic?" 

Giggle. "Uh, I don't think I'm wildly unconventional about it. The one that seems like it might be hard is - okay, so before this mess happened I was imagining what I described before you got distracted by how wrong you are about potatoes? Somebody thinks I'm great and I think he's great and we squash our lives together into a big tangly joint thing where - not that we never think about anything besides each other but we're definitely involved in all the major stuff. If I had wound up with a... I don't know, a mathematician, I'm not saying I would have taken a bunch of math classes to keep up, because specialization is valuable, but I'd have a general idea what was going on and know when to ask him for help with my mortality statistics and contagion patterns, or whatever. And I don't think strictly speaking the lifebond prevents you from satisfactorily thinking I'm great, so far it seems to be doing more prompting-to-notice than wildly changing what your type is. ...or would be if you had one. But fighting it at every turn instead of finding some terms of psychological ceasefire seems like it's going to manifest as shoving me, a person and not a lifebond, in a corner when I'm in the way of your," handwave, "stuff. And I think that - superfluosity - would make it hard to have fun on date night or whatever even if you did show up every time."

"Right. That...makes sense, honestly. I think that the lifebond wants me to desire that we squash our lives together into a tangly joint thing? Unfortunately I am..." How is he even supposed to phrase it. "Very bad at trusting people?" 

"It's - interesting that you're framing it as a skill."

"What would you call it? ...Perhaps habit would be a better framing. I am very much in the habit of being cautious and paranoid and concealing my plans. That is...something my life experiences have pushed toward." 

"I think I'd have said 'inclination'? And the lifebond supplies that in spades, leaving only deciding whether it's talking nonsense or not."

"Is it doing that for you as well? I keep having the feeling that you are deeply and utterly trustworthy even though we have known each other for a day and I have nowhere near enough actual information about you for it to be justified." 

"Yeah, it's doing it for me too, I'm running most of my decisionmaking by imagining people similar to ourselves but not ourselves and generating advice for my counterpart."

"Very reasonable." Sigh. "Something that one of my colleagues pointed out is that there is much less risk to telling you about my past work, since that is hardly a secret from the gods and even if you did go and tell, oh, the government of Rethwellan about it, it is unclear what exactly they would do about actions I took a thousand years ago. And...it will be easier to explain my current plan with that background." 

"I'm all ears."

Leareth sits back and tells her a bit about the early history of the Eastern Empire. He did plenty of not-very-nice things but there were, in his opinion, some extenuating circumstances there. Also he kept getting murdered. It took him a while after that to decide the culprit was gods and not just that an inexplicable number of human secret organizations and cults hated him.

(He'll get to his part in the Mage Wars. That's...harder to talk about.) 

Over the course of this explanation she winds up leaning on him again.

That is very distracting! It's also nice though so he doesn't actually want to tell her not to. 

Leareth gets to the point in the history where he decided to start using lots of compulsions basically as oaths of office in hopes it would lead to fewer assassination attempts on him and his key people. (It did and it meant he was able to hold the fledgling Empire stable for forty years and get through a number of infrastructure projects that raised the average quality of life drastically.) He still braces himself for her reaction. 

"If they sign up for it as part of the job description, I guess. How does that work though, I don't really know how gods issue instructions to assassins?"

"I am not sure how they did it then because I did not catch on for a long time. They generally cannot speak directly to mortals, though there are exceptions, but they have various spirit representatives, sometimes embodied magical representatives – the Companions are not quite this but they were created directly by at least one god, the details are unclear. The Suncats in Karse are another example. Also there is Foresight, prophetic visions, that sort of thing. And - the gods are able to see possible paths into the future directly, much more extensively than human Foreseers. This means that They can nudge very indirect paths into motion without it being clear to anybody from a human angle how it was done." 

"But if the indirect path terminates on someone electing to assassinate you - which it must, for the compulsions to help - they still need some way to convince or coerce the assassin, don't they? Which should be clear to the assassin if no one else."

"I was not able to question any of them during that time period. I have occasionally had the opportunity to do so since, and the reasons they believed they were doing it have varied from 'straightforward power grab' to 'they thought I was literally a demon in disguise'." 

"Huh. Uh, that makes me slightly more reluctant to move away from here - it seems like people who know me and know I've been around for a while and that I am not a demon might be a useful safety buffer and it's not trivial to replace."

"Fair enough. I can arrange to stay here for some time before it would really present a problem." 

"I'm not saying I can't pack up and haul elsewhere, it's just I'd want to be really clear on what conditions for myself and my research I'd be looking at if I move, uh, wherever you just went."

"That is entirely reasonable. I will note that any god-related schemes are unlikely to reach where I just went; I deliberately selected my base of operations such that it is not an area under the control of any of the main powerful gods, and they are not able to move fast when it comes to expanding territory." 

"They're territorial?"

"I am sure it is more complicated than that from Their perspective, but it seems to be a reasonable approximation of what actions they can and cannot feasibly take."