Ranara and her little daughter Azabel move to Urtho's Tower when the latter can say six words ("up", "mama", "milk", "no", "now", and "please") and hasn't started to walk yet. Ranara sets up to teach little children to read, ones who don't have evident Gifts yet - Ranara herself has Mindspeech, is all, with about a classroom's worth of range. Azabel sits in on classes, worn on her mother's back or later plopped in a corner with toys or, when she's only four, plopped in a corner with a book, younger than the other kids in the class. When Azabel has in fact sat through her mother's curriculum she is turned somewhat loose, to walk very carefully up and down and around the Tower, exploring.
Ma'ar spends a while fidgeting with the edge of his bedspread.
:...You can look at my gears if you want: he says, finally. :I - I would want to know, if there's something wrong with me:
It doesn't seem like there's anything in particular he needs to do to get ready. :Go ahead:
Ma'ar's eyes are closed. He seems, if anything, calmer than before.
His gears are - very unusual, but a lot of the unusual parts aren't along dimensions related to trauma. He does have a lot of the patterns she's studied before, the outer 'surfaces' of his mind almost entirely oriented toward threat-detection, strung with the sorts of long gear-shafts that would instantly propagate a reflexive response. It looks...organized, though. Almost as though half of it was deliberately planned and then tidied up on purpose, and the rest just hasn't been gotten to yet. The organized aspect seems newer, somehow, layered and partially rebuilding whatever used to be there, and a lot of the linkages are - not really about triggering a fight-or-flight response, if anything the opposite. Ma'ar's mind contains a lot of patterns aimed at deliberately calming down.
And that's mostly the edges, anyway. The deeper core of him - almost resembles Azabel's own mind, in a way, with a single central gear linking to nearly everything, though the layout is different in some hard-to-describe way. It's incredibly purposeful. ...One of the easier-to-describe aspects of the difference is that his mind is more layered, the central driving gear deeply buried and protected, visible more in the way it connects and directs everything else than in itself. His mind is also more... 'Tightly constrained' isn't quite the thing, neither is 'bunkered down', his attentional structure is very outward-oriented and not just in the sense of immediate threat-sensing. But it does look like the centre of Ma'ar is - shaped by danger, and by a lack of something, in a way somehow fundamentally different to how Azabel ended up with her organized layout.
:Umm, whether there's something wrong with me? ...And I guess I'm - curious in general, I know what my head feels like but not how it'd look to you from the outside:
:You're really organized in there. I am too but not this way... It looks like you're really oriented toward reacting very fast if anything happens around you, not in a panic way - there's a little of that but it looks kind of like you're re-doing it on purpose so you can be calm instead - that's so cool - it looks like you are very shaped by having been in danger a lot but not in a conventional presentation... and I don't know quite what's not here, I can maybe figure it out...: Lack of what, clockwork mind.
Ma'ar looks pleased. :Oh, good, is that working? I thought it was but I wasn't sure how well:
It's in general tricky to figure out that kind of context just from the clockwork structure, and Ma'ar's mind in particular seems to in some sense not want to be figured out, but... It's not a lack of safety or security, not quite, though that's close, and definitely part of it...
Most people's minds, especially young people, have very deep-set structures around interreliance on other people, attachment to loved ones, love and connection - the parts of them that, in times of stress or of striving, reach out for those supports. Ma'ar has very close to literally none of this.
This is a pattern Azabel recognizes, but most minds she's seen with a similar lack are deeply unstable. His isn't. The central gear and structure are very strongly self-stabilizing. The lack is still costing him something, probably; all of the self-soothing patterns he's effortfully building in to replace the panic reactions need to be anchored just internally. But it works. His mind holds together as a structure and it looks like he ought to be able to exert deliberate control over most of it, if not quite all at this point.
:You've got almost a - a gyroscope in there -
- most people especially kids kind of grab at people around them, family and stuff, to do things without going too far off course, and people who don't have that are sort of collapsey... and you aren't collapsey but it means you're kind of psychologically trying to balance on one foot, even if you're good at that...:
:Whoa, you can just see that!: Azabel's Gift is sososos cool actually!!! :I - huh - that makes sense. I...think that's a good way of putting the thing that...confuses me a lot about some people: Moreso back when he made a habit of reading minds all the time, but the confusion hasn't gone away, people are presumably still like that even if he's not reading them and sometimes he can notice the pattern just from their words and actions. :The...grabbing at people. Even when it's - obviously not going to work, because their grownups are bad at plans too:
:Well, grownups can be bad at plans and still know more about what's going on just because they're older - or even if they don't have a good plan a nice grownup can still get different kinds of attention from other people, and reach things off high shelves, and stuff, and people go to them for that and it's close enough as long as nothing really bad happens - this might be one of the reasons bad things happening is so damaging? Because then it much more obviously doesn't work:
Ma'ar fidgets and spends a long time trying to pick out the right words.
:I - think it's really bad to believe things that aren't true: he says finally. :And - it's not true, almost ever, that people's grownups could stop really bad things from happening. And they do happen. Less here but still, and - and everyone knows they happen more in Predain, but...: He can't figure out how to explain the next piece. :I don't know, just, it feels maybe related to why most people are crazy about blood-magic. Because it's a really bad thing, and it - only makes sense when it's instead of an even worse thing, but...people have to believe that things that bad couldn't happen to them? Or something? And...I feel like that makes it so people have to not notice problems in other places and then no one fixes them and it's BAD:
:People need to feel safe. Usually - usually never feeling safe makes people worse, not better, at doing most things:
:I think knowing whether or not it's true that I'm safe makes me better at doing things: Shrug. :I was...worse at doing things at the start, here, because I was used to places that were less safe and so I kept believing wrong things, you were right about that, but then I noticed and changed my mind:
:I think it's actually working really well! Just, this is extremely weird of you and you shouldn't expect other people to work that way: Gears are so pretty. She has a good angle on the gyroscope thing now and it's so lonely and pretty like one single cloud wafting across an empty sky.
:It's really frustrating that other people don't work that way! It - it makes me feel even more like, like I'm the only person who'll actually notice and fix the problems and I have to be strong enough to do it by myself:
:I mean, no, but I feel like a lot of the time they - don't check if the things they're doing are actually solving the problem they want solved? Or they're not even seeing it that way, that solving it is their responsibility instead of it just being - a good person thing, to do things, whether or not they work: Shrug. :I - think Tantara is less like that, or - at least it's mostly fine even with people being like that. Predain really isn't and I'm going to go back and fix it once I'm old enough:
:Uhhh - so when I was first here, some boys were bullying this girl, they - weren't actually breaking the rules and fighting physically but they were saying mean things and making her cry, and - doing things that were almost but not quite breaking the rules, like tripping her so she fell and pretending it was by accident. And there was a teaching assistant right there and he wanted them to stop it and felt bad - I, um, I was reading people's minds still, this is before I talked to you about not doing that and also I hadn't - realized yet that not everyone had knives all the time and things like that... Anyway he felt bad and it was his job to look after the students and he sort of told them 'that's not nice, stop it' except they were obviously going to keep doing it the second he went away, only he...felt all good about himself anyway for being brave and saying something, but it wasn't even brave because it wasn't dangerous for him to do... I don't know: Shrug. :I understand how the rules work better now and maybe he couldn't've done a smarter thing very easily. But it bothered me:
:I don't think there was an obvious smarter thing for him to do, just - creative things that might've helped. I think actually it wouldn't be very good if everyone tried creative things that might help whenever they had any kind of problem? Because it'd make absolutely everything harder to predict and make even boring non-creative plans around... and sometimes people's judgment would be bad and they'd make it worse... also people have to be brave to do things that aren't literally dangerous a lot and that's not even a weird one, it's like stage fright:
:- Huh, really? I don't think I have that, that seems weird. I'm - scared sometimes in a way that's wrong here, because in Predain if you said something that upset people they might decide it was rude enough to hurt you over, or just notice you existed enough to want to hurt you. And sometimes things are scary because - if people decide I'm evil then I'll get kicked out of the school and then it'll be really hard to learn enough things that I can go back and fix Predain. But it doesn't make any sense to be scared if you already know it's definitely not dangerous, or - or only dangerous in a way you're strong enough to handle:
:People's feelings don't always make sense! People with stage fright can't stand - being the center of attention, or they can't bear to look silly, it all blows up to huge proportions in their emotions even if they can tell you 'in fact no one will throw a tomato at me and even if they did that wouldn't be lastingly injurious':
:That sounds so frustrating! I would be really annoyed at my feelings if they worked that way and didn't - listen and go away once I noticed why it wasn't helping anything: