"Hmm. You know, if my teacher's theory behind this is correct then it ought to work, and might even be helpful for learning. Her idea was that Gift-channels are - somewhat specialized, but not necessarily as rigidly as people tend to think? And that, for example, a Thoughtsenser can learn to 'unfocus' their senses - in a way that is actually much less useful for reading the content of thoughts, just as a poorly ground telescope lens is no good for looking at stars, but that also picks up on broader patterns of the mind? In which case learning to 'unfocus' Thoughtsensing in this way, to also cover what Mindhealing Sight generally does, would mean looking around the usual Thoughtsensing-specific shields? ...I am not sure, though, this is all very speculative." 

"Huh! Well, I still have to find people who don't mind if I accidentally read their minds to practice till I can unfocus enough."

"I do not mind if you practice on me, but unfortunately I am also very busy. Do you have other ideas for people to ask?" 

"Ranara would probably say yes but I don't actually know if she's comfortable with it as opposed to just thinking it would only be responsible to agree."

Nod. "Yes, I agree. What about your friend Skan?" 

"He'd probably actually be fine with it, yeah."

"Then it sounds like we have a plan - you can talk to him. And if it turns out he is uncomfortable with it then we could discuss ways to bring it up with your mother that would involve less implicit pressure?" 

"Yeah, that sounds good."

"Good luck, then!" 

She brings it up with Skan that afternoon.

Bounce bounce bounce. "That would be sssoo cool if you could learn to do it! Of courssse you can practisse on me!" 

She giggles. "Thanks! Make sure you aren't thinking about anything too sensitive and say when?"

"...Okay, when!" 

Skan is very determinedly thinking about RACING MOVES. The one where you need to make a really steep turn and you sort of scrunch one wing and tuck the other one under you and it feels like you're about to flip over but you DON'T and instead you're suddenly going the other way. The one where you need to dodge a brick wall at the LAST SECOND and the best way to do it is to very very suddenly bank upward and your belly almost touches the bricks but it doesn't quite... Skan's visual-spatial imagination is incredibly detailed and this is filling nearly all of his attention. 

Okay, blurry. How does she unfocus the sense, make this all blur into just "flying" and then "nothing in particular" - "Say things? Things that could be true or lies."

Wow it's really hard to think of lies on the spot! "I, ummm, I - like the colour red." (True.) "My father is better at flying than me." (So, so false.) "My teacher iss nice." (Duuuubious, his teacher is nice to Skan but Skan, having had Azabel as a friend from babyhood, is very aware of bullying in general and his teacher isn't horrible to the less popular students but 'nice' would be a stretch...) 

Blur blur blur, till all she gets is the faintest sense of whether he's all lined up or not in there -

Even with her level of trained control, it's hard! It's really really hard! 

- but she gets a flicker of it, just for a fraction of a second, she couldn't say anything specific about Skan's thoughts except that he's definitely lying about liking the gargoyles above the rose-garden entrance. And then it's gone and she's lost it, but it happened!

"EEEE I had it for a sec - I'll try again, keep going, you can repeat stuff till I'm closer to having it down, it won't make a difference till then -"

“Eeeeee!!! That’sss sssso exsssiting!” Skan’s gryphon accent gets much more marked lately when he’s excited.

He racks his memory and tries to repeat things from before until Azabel tells him it matters again. 

She lets him know, when she's got the hang of the blur to the point where she can pay somewhat more attention to what he's in fact saying.

Oh no now he has to come up with more ideas for truths and lies and in-betweens, this game gets hard after a while! 

"- I read a book about a bridge that collapssed because the inventor wass drunk when he dessigned it." (Not quite true, the bridge collapsed and the engineer had been negligent but probably not drunk.) "My friend Latiksha likess the colour blue." (True.) "My father was sscared of the dark when he was little..." (False; it's his mother who was.) 

She marks her observations down and confirms them with him.

She's catching nearly all of his lies! It's not as accurate as when she does it with Mindhealing yet, especially on the ambiguous cases; Skan discovers he can slip things through by thinking mostly about the part that is true and not the false aspects. 

Then she needs more practice! (She has shorthand for various flavors of ambiguity and is working on having the same finesse with those in this mode as she does with Mindhealing-Sight.)

She can make a little more progress in the next candlemark of practicing, and then Skan begs off, promising that he'll spend some time thinking of LOTS AND LOTS of truths and lies for the next time she wants to practice.