:I will check if he needs it today, just a moment: Pause while he does so. :Yes, he says that would be fine: 

So he'll head over there. 

Leareth grabs a pastry so that he can eat it and walk, and meets him there. "Thank you again for offering to help with this." 

"Well, no conquering the Noldor and making me regret it.

It's good, having you back."

"Fortunately, since I am friends with you, I know that actually being in charge of the Noldor is far too much work to appeal to me. I am very lazy, actually." Leareth closes the door firmly and sits down. "...All right. I have a few ideas for harmless and trivial compulsions to test, but you can also suggest some." 

"I don't expect I'm very picky but do remember the Quendi thing about imprisonment, anything that restricts movement can trigger it."

"Right. I will be careful to avoid that. For starting out, I am not going to be able to do them subtly enough to be unnoticeable anyway, so I will tell you in advance. Does a compulsion to bring me that stool over there seem safe and inoffensive?" The Work Room has very minimal, simple furnishings, since Vanyel expects to occasionally break them if he's practicing explodey magic, but of course they're Quendi furnishings so they're exquisitely beautiful anyway. 

"Yes."

Leareth takes a deep breath, gathers just a tiny bit of power, and lays a compulsion telling Maitimo to go retrieve the stool. 

He goes and gets the stool, trying to poke the thought - does it feel like it obviously came from someone else? Is he able to think about doing things like smashing the stool that'd get in the way of doing it? 

It's not obviously alien enough that he would definitely have noticed it if he were already moving about doing errands while thinking about other things, but when poked, it does feel different from his other thoughts, in a hard-to-describe way. 

He can think about smashing the stool but this doesn't seem to be linked to the thought-thread in control of his actions. 

Huh. But presumably you can't check whether your actions are compulsion-based by just - interrupting them - how much can he dawdle about giving it to Leareth -

He can take slower or smaller steps but not stop, apparently. 

- so if you're ever in doubt, try stopping. That seems good to know. He gives Leareth the stool. 

"Thank you. I am taking it off." Leareth sets the stool down. "That was a compulsion on the level of action. They can also be done at more indirectly at the layer of goals. It takes more skill and I am not sure I can manage it yet, but in theory it should be harder to notice because it will interact more smoothly with other thoughts and goal-threads." 

"- yeah, that seems like it'd be harder to notice. What happens if you try it and don't have enough skill for it yet -"

"I think either it fails entirely - possibly in a way noticeable to you - or it ends up just being the action-kind anyway. Should I try?" 

"Sure - I don't know what's the most helpful line of practice here, me learning interesting things about compulsions is surely a secondary priority -"

"I am not exactly sure either. Very complicated conditional actions are also a higher-skill compulsion - for example, the accidental failed murder attempt on Vanyel that happened because my system for cancelling it apparently had an error, was a conditional compulsion based on Vanyel being present and not in a state to defend himself, which would be very rare for him and is a subjective judgement, and also it did not specify a weapon. That is a violent example, but some kind of careful conditional would also be required for nonviolently infiltrating a spy in wartime and managing to obtain reports from them." 

"That makes sense. As long as nothing's going to break anything in my head if it fails, and as long as you can remove it afterwards, I'm fine with trying things that you don't expect to have down yet."

"It may be uncomfortable or startling if it fails, but it should not cause any damage, it is really a minimal amount of power. Hmm. Can you do a handstand?" 

"Yes."

Leareth focuses hard, and tries to set down a compulsion telling Maitimo that he wants to show off a handstand. 

He wants to show off a handstand!

- does he? Or is Leareth trying to make him. Can he instead want to stand still just to check whether he in fact wants to show off a handstand.

The wanting to do a handstand is momentarily in tension with the wanting to check whether he wants to do a handstand, and then it sort of snaps, which gives him a brainzappy feeling that isn't quite painful but is very surprising and makes him lose his train of thought entirely.