Leareth is lying in a stone room, and nothing in particular is happening right now, and he is mostly succeeding at not having any thoughts. It's a fine moment. He is not, literally this second, being tortured. This is not useful at all for predicting what the next moment is going to be like, of course, or for whether 'quiet stone room' has any particular resemblance to reality, but Leareth has gotten pretty good at not being curious.
"I wasn't expecting it at all, but I'm glad for me too."
:Bella, I'm pretty sure he thinks me being this much better is implausible and evidence this is fake! Probably it won't help to argue about it?:
Probably not. Trying really directly to convince him is pretty - hostile, in a way? So I just bring him evidence he asks for and don't try to walk him through assessing it too much.
:That makes sense:
"Leareth, there's another thing the other Vanyel said I could tell you," he says, slowly. "He went on a research mission, right, I'm sure you knew that. And - he found some of Urtho's journals, which had survived the Cataclysm. They're in Kata'shin'a'in now."
Vanyel can't tell if that's good or bad or just noise, but he forges ahead. "Sorry, I'm missing a lot of the context here, other Vanyel has more, but he gave me this bit. Urtho admired you, he wrote that you were his best student, and - the war wasn't your fault, and Urtho regretted it at the end."
Leareth rolls over and holds up a hand. He's quiet for thirty seconds.
"Can Vanyel come back another time. I still want to see the subtle arts things."
"Um, waiting is fine if it's going to be ten minutes, but if it might be a candlemark then I'd rather go back and finish my work."
"Okay, let me think what wouldn't be easily faked in a hallucination and shouldn't be disproportionately scary... Okay, look at my face for a minute?"
And nothing about her face changes, yet it's suddenly unrecognizable.
Huh.
Leareth sits up again, looking more alert - more like his alt always does - than he has at any points. He looks at her from several angles. Frowns.
"Do you have others like that. It is fine if they are more scary. You could do the calm thing."
"Sure." She undoes the prosopagnosia and calms him and does an associative visual agnosia. "The first one was faces, this one does objects." There aren't that many objects in the room, but she can float a fork from his lunch over and offer it to him. "What's that?"
He makes faces at it for a while. "I do not know. That is very strange." He goes and examines some other things - his paper, the books in his room, his blanket and pillow. "...You can undo it now."
He looks thoughtful. Also like he's getting kind of bleary but pushing through it.
"Could you do the first one again, with the colours?"