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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
"Sorry, I know you didn't pick it." She's practicing on her less valuable nonwinged monkeys; the winged ones have similar brains so the experience will carry over.
It's a lot tricker working with monkey brains than with mice brains, there's more complexity there to get hooked up to wrong, but she does eventually get monkeys that both have Fetching channels and keep accidentally using them. They are so confused about this development!
Poor confused monkeys!
Now she has to figure out how to get other Gifts in there. Healing, say, though she'll want their enclosure warded so they can't accidentally kill themselves with it. Is that doable?
The channels aren't any harder to add, but getting the brain region right seems a lot harder. One of Leareth's Healers speculates that Healing involves Sight and manipulation of it which is more complicated to interpret than Fetching and touchsight, not too different in principle from moving objects with hands.
Well, monkeys can see. And most people don't even use touchsight, not consciously. She will work at it. Being able to make Healers on-demand would be pretty amazing.
"I wonder if a limiting factor is that monkeys cannot talk to explain what they are doing, and Fetching is very obvious whereas Healing may be less externally visible so your assistants are not sure when they are doing it? We could transfer an Animal Mindspeaker over here to attempt communication with them about it."
An Animal Mindspeaker can be obtained! His name is Rastan and he adores the monkeys, says they're far better conversationalists than any animals he's read or communicated with before. It turns out that the ones she was working with do in fact have Healing-Sight, at least some of them, and were using their Gifts in small ways, but often clumsily enough that it hurt, either themselves or another monkey, and then they would be anxious about doing it again. He's not a Healer so he doesn't know how to give them lessons directly, but if Belrun can observe, he can try to relay instructions into monkeythoughts.
She will attempt to teach monkeys to use their Healing, just enough that she can tell if the Gift came through right.
They can totally be taught to Heal small cuts and scrapes on themselves and their friends! It seems like they struggle with the finesse required to do any more internal kinds of Healing (and also they're all healthy right now anyway), which is fine for her purposes, they may just not be clever enough to learn multiple Healing techniques, since they are after all still monkeys even if they look disconcertingly human.
These ones don't look human so much! Since she can't expect Gifts to reliably pass on to offspring she wants to have plenty of experience in the technique and then apply it in its complete form to a "finished" monkey, but the unfinished monkeys are relatively expendable test subjects.
Can she make Mindspeaking, Thoughtsensing monkeys? That's her own full complement of Gifts handled if she can but Rastan will be necessary to find out if it's been managed!
She can! Though giving monkeys Thoughtsensing-type channels plus the best approximation that can be made to how the human brain area for it works still results in something more like Empathy plus some sense-sharing, since monkeys don't have language and don't think in a very speechlike way. The monkeys are all over it, though! They seem to find it delightful and Rastan claims they're now chattering constantly with bursts of emotion and pictures through each other's eyes.
Vanyel's happy to be a test subject for all of his Gifts! The remaining ones are Farsight, Foresight (though he's not sure the monkey will be very enthused about that, or able to use it in testable ways), Bardic, Empathy, Firestarting (perhaps also ill-advised), and mage-gift.
"Can monkeys even sing?" he muses.
"The more heavily edited ones probably could, normal monkeys can't make human vocalizations but I want to be able to talk even when I'm possessing a winged monkey," she says. "These ones nah. I think I'd probably skip it anyway, gives me the creeps. Same with Empathy. And you're right about Firestarting and Foresight but Farsight and mage-gift and, heh, Rastan's right here with Animal Mindspeech..."
Farsight turns out to be really easy. The brain area for it is less complex and mostly just links directly to the standard area for processing vision, and the monkeys, with a bit of instruction from Rastan, find it very straightforward to use.
Rastan informs her that they think it's hilarious to spy on the rest of the facility, especially the dining hall, and gossip about it; his translation of monkey gossip is pretty cryptic but they definitely have opinions on who should hook up with who. They should probably shield any areas they don't want monkeys spectating, but he's in favour of letting them peek at the dining hall, it gives them more enrichment and helps them not to get bored in captivity.
Oh no that's so cute and silly. Do they have opinions on whether Leareth and Belrun should be hooking up?
Their bedroom is already shielded against Farsight (in addition to the shielding on the outside of the building, which helpfully keeps the monkeys from looking further afield, in addition to keeping spies out, but doesn't protect the dining hall from the monkeys or vice versa.) He'll pass on that perhaps his other staff should consider shielding their bedrooms too if they want to avoid being the subject of monkey gossip.
For the first time, getting the monkeys hooked up to mage-channels is tricky even with Leareth's advice and concert-Sight.
Well, it's not essential - as long as she moves into a monkey with the Gifts she's used to having, she won't be in a worse position to continue working on it from there (speaking of which, how is attaching her to a book and the book to her chosen monkey coming along?). But why is this one so hard?
Leareth thinks mage-channels are structurally more complicated, maybe, since the Gift is able to do so many things? He's sure they can get it eventually, though.
He's finalized a spell design to make the book artifact! He's still figuring out the link-to-monkey; usually he'd get to the point of being sure enough in a spell like that by testing it a few times and making incremental improvements, but testing this one is, well, fraught, so instead he's relying entirely on being very confident in the theory behind of it, which takes longer.
"You could try it with some of my trained mice? The green batch is getting kind of old and you could try to reincarnate one into one of the younger pink ones and see if it still knows tricks."