"I wish to help you but I also feel I would not be performing adequate due diligence at all if let you build Sing here without doing any of my own checks. Let me think." He's silent for a bit. "Is there a stage in building Sing where it would be less powerful, but still intelligent enough to speak to and study?" 

"If you make it enough hardware to unfold the seed code, but not much more than that, I guess it could probably talk to you and couldn't build any robots except by convincing people to build it robots, but people aren't secure systems."

Nod. "Still an improvement on not checking, I think, especially if I am the only person who speaks to it; I too am not entirely secure against a being far more intelligent than myself, of course, but I am very paranoid. Hmm. How long would it take you to write out the seed code? We could perhaps speed it if you can hold some in your surface thoughts for Thoughtsensers to write down." 

"I guess we could do that but it'd be a lot of person-hours and also, like, I don't think it will make any sense like that, even if you make me teach you the language the encoding is based on and give you programming lessons when I do not myself know any programming, because a superintelligence wrote it - Sing isn't still running on its original code, it's changed itself. If you insist on talking to it I guess a few hours of chatter still kills fewer people than your original plan but it is a huge waste of time to not just build something to let Page instantly dump the code into the hardware instead of using me as a very slow robot."

"...Ah. If it is not the original human-written instructions, that does seem much less tractable." Leareth sighs slightly. "I will give you everything you need to advance as quickly as possible and work toward the tools that will let you build hardware for Sing - I assume this will take quite some time even with all the resources you need - and in the meantime I will consider what to do. Setting up Sing with initially very limited hardware is probably the best way to go - possibly there are ways to further limit it with magic - but I wish to think about it carefully. You have to realize that it would also be very irresponsible for me to help build something in my world that could turn out to only be friendly to humans due to some conditionals that are different here." 

"Sing doesn't have a reason to hide it if something's delicate about it."

"Back in your world in the past, you mean? Or if we build it here?" 

"Back home. It would totally have a reason here but my point is I would have probably encountered the information if Sing's value system wasn't robust to the possibility of finding nonhuman people, or alternate universes, or magic, all of which are things people from my world like to think about sometimes."

"Interesting. I suppose that is somewhat reassuring. Does Page have any more information on Sing's history and development - who wrote the original instructions, and such? This might also be more helpful than nothing, here." 

"Sing's actually a combination of several AIs that merged or made values trades during the Quiet War, but yeah, it has stuff on which ones and what they were about -" She can start listing them by their popular English names, translating the ones that make sense to translate like "Sugardream", which is understood to be the source of Sing's conservatism with direct brain modification.

Leareth listens attentively and takes notes and eventually hides a yawn with his hand. "I ought to sleep, I think," he confesses. "If you wish to move faster, you could begin working on a list of everything you will require. We can negotiate to retrieve your work from Haven, assuming any of it is still intact." 

"Okay. Thank you."

Leareth makes sure she has lots of paper, tells her to ask the Healer sitting up with Van if she needs anything and they'll Mindspeak someone else to get it, and heads out for the night. 

The Healer wakes Vanyel again sometime after midnight and makes him drink more fluids. 

He's still pretty groggy, and very annoyed to be woken, in the first few seconds he's disoriented enough to try to slap the Healer away from him. 

After being propped up and carefully coaxed to drink, though, he seems more awake. "...Tarinda?" he says, blearily. "Where are we." He grimaces. "My head hurts." 

"We're at Leareth's place."

Vanyel's looks blankly at her through half-open eyelids. "Why. Are we at Leareth's place." He tries to sit up more. "–Gah. Feel terrible." His voice is still kind of slurred, but understandable. 

"Easy," the Healer says, supporting him and then nudging him back against the pillows. 

Vanyel looks down at Yfandes, who now has her muzzle resting in his lap, and tiredly strokes her mane. Then winces. "Ow." 

:...Tarinda, can you apologize on my behalf for that? And then explain? I shouldn't Mindspeak to him right now, he has very bad backlash and it hurts him: 

"Yfandes says sorry and that she shouldn't Mindspeak to you through the backlash. You were in the Web-room with Savil and then, according to Leareth, a god started trying to kill me. There was a lot of lightning, and some earthquakes. I'm not sure exactly what happened to you - I almost went in after you but I couldn't, you understand - I loaned my talisman to a stablehand but he got spooked on the way in, eventually Leareth came over through his gate and hauled you out himself and got you across to here. I got you breathing again. I've been talking to Leareth. He says he'll get me everything I need but he wants to check Sing over first, which is a little silly but won't waste as much time as trying to work without material support."

Vanyel follows along better this time, his eyes sort of managing to focus. 

His expression is one of dawning horror. "...Oh. No. Was it me. Did I - cause an earthquake - is anyone dead...?" 

"I don't know. Haven't heard back yet. Leareth's going to help make sure that if anyone's dead they get frozen."

Vanyel nods and immediately regrets it, grimacing and bringing a hand to his forehead. He tries to think through what Tarinda just told him, and shortly regrets that too. 

"Ow," he says, sort of plaintively. 

"Do you want painkillers? I'm afraid I can't give you anything strong when you're still drowsy like this, but willowbark might take the edge off."