What's her sight-metaphor?

:Bread, apparently! I had not even known that before, she writes up notes on it at a higher level of abstraction since Sight is hard to interpret without practice: 

Bread!!!! Oh no, that's so silly.

:She tells me it can convey a surprising amount of detail! I am not sure how: 

Working through a metaphor at all sounds like it'd be - useful for starting out but in the long run a hindrance compared to just perceiving everything directly as the mess it is.

Nod. :Nayoki would probably agree. It seems helpful since rarity of Mindhealers means there is not really any pedagogical tradition and everybody is figuring it out on their own, but, still: 

Sometimes I wish I'd landed in Valinor just a little later, and had longer to get a real education in therapeutic technique.

:I can understand that: He looks thoughtful for a moment. :...I do not wish to keep you if you have work to return to, but - if you wanted to get a head start on thinking about the copying, you are welcome to look at my core memories today: 

(There is a very faint note of anxiety in his mindvoice, on the last phrase, which is quite rare for local Leareth.) 

Uh, taking an overview-level look in advance might be helpful. If you're actually okay with it - are you -

:On the meta level, yes: He takes a slow breath. :I suppose on an emotional level, it is not entirely comfortable: 

I don't want to rush you.

:I do not endorse delaying this for my alt on the basis that I am slightly nervous! One moment, I think that I can dissolve that feeling now that I have remarked on it:

He is quiet for almost exactly sixty seconds.

:...All right, I am comfortable with it. I would prefer to be not standing in a halfway for it, though: This is still where they are. He glances around, points at a meeting room nearby. :Shall we?: 

Sure. That was fast.

Leareth slips into the room ahead of her and sits. :I had already done most of the relevant thinking and unpacking my instinctive responses here, over the past six weeks: A brief smile. :Among various other reasons that I trust you with this: even if you were tempted to change anything, which I suspect you are just not, the change I would expect you to make is adding 'also mind control is bad', and you are not going to do so, because you think mind control is bad: 

...she snickers.

Broader smile. 

:I am ready - do you need me to show you where to look...?: 

It'd help.

Then he can open an imaginary door in his mind, and hold the entry-point to what he calls his 'core memories' in his attention for her. He admits it's a slightly confusing way to refer to it, because it's not exactly a memory, even if he builds it out of the memories he manages to carry across between lifetimes. But, anyway, there it is. 

I see it -

Peep.

- A sky full of stars - a tower silhouetted black against the horizon, majestic - lights in every window - the blazing determination and hope guiding every pair of hands that had worked to lay each brick -

It's an 1800-year-old memory and he's needed to work incredibly hard to keep dragging it across each incarnation. Also it feels very, very vulnerable, to know that Bella is looking at it, but Leareth has managed to unpack his emotions about that until it basically doesn't bother him, it's just something he can notice. 

- never to walk away - to return again and again - no matter the cost - no matter how long it takes -

A relentless driving purpose. It's present in the background of all of his thoughts (and it's pretty noticeable, now, that this is true for him and not currently true of his alt), but fundamentally the source of it lives here. The part of Leareth that holds onto why it's worth it, to stay in the world, rebuilding again and again and again - paying irreversible costs, when he has to, because the alternative is failure, and this is the part of a Leareth that's unwilling to ever, ever give up.

(In his surface thoughts, there's a note of gratitude that Bella exists and showed up in his world, and told him of other worlds, because it means he might not have to pay the worst of those costs after all - and to the core values part of him, that's an unimaginably precious thing.) 

"Wow," she murmurs. And, "It's... not going to be straightforward to copy that over to him but - probably it's not all gone -"

Leareth nods. 

"...I think I just realized why he is afraid I would kill him. He - must worry that I would not recognize him as still relevantly the same person, and he knows I would be concerned about that. He knows how intensely I try to maintain my integrity-of-self across time, because I am a dangerous person as it is - I have too much hubris to be safe - and, losing a piece of my values here and there could be incredibly bad for the world. And he might think that if I judged it too difficult or risky to repair, I would destroy him rather than risk him rebuilding it wrong." 

He shakes his head. "That is not in fact how I feel - I want him to be okay, no matter how long it takes, and I think we can figure that out without undue risk - but I understand why he might think it, especially given how primed he is to be terrified of everything." 

"What does 'too much hubris to be safe' mean in this context?"

"...Hmm." Leareth thinks about it for a minute. "Well, I think that the current state of the world overall is unacceptable, and want to change it, which requires extremely large scale plans. I am literally trying to fight the gods. Successfully fighting gods requires ruthlessness. My plans have, and do, cause harm in the world, in the name of achieving various objectives. If I were wrong about the necessary objectives, or even just sloppy and incautious, then I would be walking around causing damage to no good ends." 

"That makes sense. Hubris is as dangerous as science in Materia."