Nudge nudge nudge?

It clicks back into place, neatly! 

"Excellent work! That was very tidy. You have good control already." 

"Thank you! It would be scary if I didn't..."

He nods, solemnly. "I am glad you understand that already. Perhaps because of how they are named, many people fail to understand that Healing and Mindhealing can be at least as dangerous, if not more so, than those Gifts traditionally considered useful for combat." 

"I don't know how I'd fight with it but doing something stupid and random would be really bad."

"Yes. And harder to set right than when the mage-students squabble and burn each other with fireballs. I am glad I do not need to scare you with tales of what can go wrong, for you to take that as seriously as it deserves." 

"...can you tell me them anyway though?"

"Yes, of course." 

Lionwind spends a while doing that, relating the stories of times he was called in - or stories his teacher told him of times she was called in, often from another city, to fix something some student had done to a patient or more often to their friend or classmate, while goofing around or just entirely by accident. A common beginner's mistake for students with strong Gifts, especially if they're strong Empaths too, is to be startled by someone's fear or sadness and fling a lot of poorly-aimed Mindhealing at them, which usually just makes people hallucinate; more subtly, it can make them see sounds, or taste colours. You can accidentally make someone unable to remember a category of words, like the names of colours or seasons; you can make people unable to recognize faces; you can scramble someone's ability to read or sing a tune; he once had a student Mindheal someone in some bizarre way where they could only sing, not speak. You can give people random phobias to things like stairs or cups. 

In some of these cases he has theories of what was going on; often, he or whoever was there just did their best to set it right without ever understanding how exactly it went wrong in that way. Minds are complicated, even for experienced Mindhealers. 

Aza takes extremely careful notes on all these things. "I don't think I knew that all those things would be - things the way a rock is a thing instead of the way a bucket of different rocks is a thing," she remarks.

"I will be honest, we do not even understand which things in the mind are - objects that way, that can be modified as a single move, versus not. For example, it is very hard to block access to a specific memory and no others, though many Kings and spies have wanted this done. But you can quite easily make someone unable to recognize or recall the name of an object they are holding, even though they can describe its appearance and shape exactly! I do not know why!" 

"What! That's so weird! Why!!! I know you said you don't know but WHY!"

He smiles broadly. "So curious! Perhaps someday you will be the one who discovers the answer." 

"Maybe I will! That will teach brains to be so mysterious."

"I think you are going to be an excellent Mindhealer! Well, that is perhaps enough for a first lesson. Do you have any more questions on today?" 

"Can we make people need less sleep?"

"Huh! Assuming you mean in the long run, I am actually not sure. There is a trick for making yourself more alert for a short period - Healers can do it too, coming from a different 'angle', our scholars think that this means the two Gifts are looking at the same underlying structure but it could be entirely distinct mechanisms. Anyway. I had never thought to even try whether making someone need fewer candlemarks of sleep per night on a permanent basis can be done. What an intriguing idea - you are so creative!" 

"It would be so useful!"

"I had not really thought about it, since I like sleeping, but - yes, I suppose it would." He seems surprised and a bit nonplussed. 

"I like sleeping too but I don't need to do it all night. Once in a while would be fine. Or just a few hours every night is probably more doable. If this is doable at all."

"...I have heard of people needing more or less sleep innately, so one assumes that if you can find the ones who need less sleep and obtain permission to look at their minds, you could at least check if the difference is one that Mindhealing can affect." 

"I want to do that! How can I find people who need different amounts of sleep?"

Lionwind thinks for a moment. "- Hmm, I am not aware of any treatises written recently such that you could still find the patients studied. You may have to just ask your acquaintances. I suppose you could write to Mindhealers across the region - I could give you a list - but they will mostly only see very sick patients, who I think on average tend to sleep more - or else very erratically and poorly - because of their mental illnesses." 

"Why do those make people sleep more or worse?"

"I think that is another case where our scholars do not yet understand everything! The theories are that some mental conditions, such as depression, involve having less life-energy to drive a mind, which thus spends more time in sleep, whereas conditions like wild-madness involve an out-of-balance excess of these energies - where the patients sleep less and yet this compounds their imbalance and their madness and wildness." 

"Why do energies need to balance? My metaphor has some weights that could tip stuff over if they were wrong but beehives don't, what's going on in the actual mind?"