Blink blink. Isn't that kind of obvious. Also she doesn't speak any languages and has never heard of those places or this continent.

Upstairs, receiving updates by Mindspeech from the Healer keyed to the shields, Leareth paces.

On the one hand, there's a maybe-dangerous alien creature probably from another world in his basement right now. With some sort of magic that's probably entirely new to him, that he wants to know everything about. And who understands them but seems unable to communicate or do anything else because of mind-control.

The obvious solution is to take off the mind-control or at least some of it, but Nayoki didn't recognize it - like set-commands, she said, but not done by a Mindhealer - and she wasn't a hundred percent sure she could take it off safely. Also he doesn't know why it's there. They're pretty sure she wasn't sent here as an agent by someone who wants Leareth dead, at least, but that doesn't mean she isn't dangerous. 

He could coercively read her mind, or have Nayoki do it, but that sounds like a great way to have her never want to cooperate with anyone here ever. 

Sigh. 

:Aldrin, I am going to Gate out to the west bunker location and scry the room from there, in case she is in fact dangerous: It's possible she's the kind of dangerous that could follow his Gate, but there are a lot of shields against mage-energies between her and where he is now, she shouldn't even be aware of his existence (and her thoughts have shown no sign of it apparently), and just in case he can Gate in two steps, it's much less likely she could somehow follow both unless she has some sort of absurd past-sight. 

:All right. You want me to stay up here?: 

:Yes. I want Farsight on the room - I can key you to the shields - and immediately pass a message if anything untoward happens. Not to me, to the troop compound at Noku, they can relay it on: He takes a breath, lets it out. :I am going to have Nayoki talk to her about removing the mind-control safely, or some of it at least, so we can find out where in all hells she came from and why she is here: 

If she burns down his entire facility here or something he's going to be pretty irritated, but he does have backup copies of all the books elsewhere. 

He Gates out. 

Nayoki re-enters the basement and sits as well. She doesn't even know the woman's name, which feels very awkward right now, but oh well. 

"You are under some kind of mind-control, yes?" she says. "Preventing you from speaking or moving." 

She would not actually describe it as "mind control" if you asked her but it doesn't seem worth quibbling over. Blink blink.

"Did whoever was keeping you prisoner do that to you?" 

Blink blink. He is so so far away now. He'll have time to forget her name.

Interesting. Nayoki shows no acknowledgement that she picked up on that thought, though. "Are your magical powers dangerous if they are not controlled in that way?" 

She's not really sure what to do with that question? Of course sorcery can be dangerous? These mortals have some but maybe all they have is their teleporting thing and being really bad at healing, she's not sure. She will go with blink blink blink because there are obviously other ways to not be dangerous with sorcery such as not doing it or only doing kinds that are not dangerous.

"If we help you become un-mind-controlled, do you have any intention of hurting anybody here once you are freed from it."

Nayoki is going to guess 'not' from her (limited) sense of the woman so far. But she has the Haighlei variant of truth magic; it's not like the Heralds' truth spell, it's always there when she wants it to be. Even if she weren't passively reading the nonhuman woman's surface thoughts, she would know. 

Blink blink blink. He's not here and she doesn't even want to try fighting him, she'd lose.

Wow, Nayoki really wants to know who 'he' is now and whether he would be able to fight off a set-command to the face. This is a horrible way to keep someone imprisoned and she's mad at whoever did it. - She has to admit Leareth would totally do it if he thought there was a good reason, but he never has before this point. 

"I have a kind of mind-magic that can fix most forms of mind-control," she says, "and I want to do that for you, but I have not seen this kind before and also you are not human and your mind may be different. Do you know if there is a safe non-magical way to undo it?" 

Blink blink but also she's now pretty fucking tense. If they feed her, which they can because nothing is ever allowed to get between Thorn and his kinks, not even Thorn's own cleverness, they can let her go. But they have no idea what they're doing so who knows if they'll think of that, they haven't even wondered if she's hungry yet.

That's the weirdest kind of mind-control she's ever heard of, what. 

Also, now she has a quandary, which is whether to try to free this person sooner at the cost of revealing they're reading her mind. Which they'll presumably end up having to reveal eventually if she sticks around any length of time, and she's likely to be more pissed about it the longer they put that off, but also if they piss her off now they don't, actually, know anything yet. And Leareth told her not to contact him directly unless there was a true emergency, in case the person's unknown magic includes tracking and she turns out to be hostile. 

He also told her to use her judgement on talking to her and making her feel welcome, because Leareth really wants to know where she's from and how she got here and everything about her magic, and it seems more likely they'll get that with her active cooperation. Also they won't be able to keep her here against her will once she's not mind-controlled, and Nayoki has a hard time telling what does what, in there, so she can't let the woman talk without also letting her decide to pop out the same way she arrived here. Probably, even if she is pissed, she won't be hostile enough to the people who freed her to try to hurt them if they don't attempt to trap her against her will? And if they are, Leareth is in an unknown location right now and, knowing him, probably scrying from a distance to watch what's happening. 

Nayoki takes a deep breath. In her judgement, she's pretty sure lying to people is not optimal for getting along with them in the longer term, and fessing up sooner is better than clearly putting it off as long as possible, especially since this is a very natural moment for it. 

"The kind of mind-magic I have means I can read your surface thoughts," she says. "If we give you food we can then do something to free you? Enaka can get food for you now." 

She doesn't really hear the rest of the question because now she is trying to multiply 451 in her head by itself a couple times because that's where she left off when she last tried to calculate the cube root of ninety-four million. "Enaka" makes a little snap-ripple in her mind anyway.

Huh that's really obvious to Mindhealing-Sight and Nayoki has no idea what it is and doesn't like it. She passes on in Mindspeech that people should not say anyone's name in front of the stranger until they understand why her head does that. Fortunately no one else thinks this has happened at all until now. 

The Healer gets some buttered bread for the woman and tries to figure out how to offer it to her, given that it's unclear she can move. "If you are hungry I have food?" 

Responding to someone reading your mind by immediately filling your head with math is a really reasonable response and quite clever actually, but it's also so inconvenient! Nayoki hopes the woman will at least be paying enough attention to notice that they're trying to feed her and, like, maybe cooperate with this process at all. 

She notices the food - looks like, uh, she has no idea what it is actually but it smells edible - and doesn't stop with the math but sort of slows down at it, taking little moments between steps to consider if this is a good idea, they haven't hurt her but - no, that's Enaka, that won't work at all anyway, 452 times 452 is 204,304 and...

Nayoki is confused and then forms the hypothesis that it - has to be someone whose name the woman doesn't know? She can take the bread from Enaka and try offering it herself instead. 

They haven't hurt her. They have no idea what they're doing, but - well, her alternative is lying here in a heap for a few thousand years. Starving. So. Kind of a no brainer really. She opens her mouth.

Nayoki would really like to know what they're doing! For that it'd be helpful if the stranger could talk and inform them of how anything works where she comes from, because it seems to have nothing in common with the kinds of magic Nayoki knows. 

She pops the bread into her mouth and waits.

The fairy chews, and swallows, and doesn't really like the butter but thinks the bread's all right, and in between figuring out what 204,304 times 452 is, attempts to think loudly and clearly that 1) as soon as she can talk her new master should please STOP READING HER MIND, WHAT THE FUCK and 2) the phrase she's looking for might be "I rescind all your orders".

Great, that's really helpful. 

:Get her one of the shield-talismans for Thoughtsensing, please: she says to Enaka, because that seems like a friendly thing to do for someone who is understandably mad at you for reading their mind, even though it's not like they could gotten to the right set of actions very easily any other way. 

"I rescind all your orders," she says, and stops reading the woman's thoughts but does keep watching a bit with Mindhealing-Sight just to see what happens to all those not-set-commands.