"I am not sure. I...suspect that there are large-scale loops of some kind that need to balance, where - as you say, it can tip over into one whirlpool or another that is hard to escape - but to be honest, our scholarship on this is not very advanced." 

"Oh, okay. I guess I'll fix that and then we'll know."

(Awww she is adorably enthusiastic and excited.) 

"Of course. Any other questions?" 

"I will think of more for next time. When is next time?"

"I thought we could meet three times a week, to start, at this same time? And I will give you homework exercises, this time it will just be to practice refining your Sight on your own mind." 

"Okay!!!"

He pats her shoulder. "See you in a couple of days. You are making very quick progress so far." 

"I'll see you then!"

And she comes back two days later with a great big list of questions. What makes people have mental problems in the first place? Why do people have to sleep at all? Why was the first kiss thing near the rafting memory? Why is anything near anything? What kinds of things can't Mindhealers do that it might seem they would be able to? Her mama wants her to ask if this will help her defend herself when she goes on the long trip to visit her papa, it's usually not very dangerous but it would be good to know. Can she make her other potential Gifts awaken? Is there a standard best practice for making very sure someone is REALLY okay with letting her look besides just what she's been doing.

"So many questions! You are such a wonderfully curious student." And Lionwind sets himself to answering them methodically, one at a time. 

It's not entirely understood why people have mental problems! Some of it seems to be an inborn predisposition; the same way some people are physically frail and prone to sickliness, or born with heart problems, or end up falling ill with cancers, some people are prone to nerves and phobias and melancholy, or succumb to sudden madness. Sometimes it's caused by stressful or traumatic life events, but how damaged different people are by the same event also seems to vary. It's a known pattern that many women because depressed after giving birth, and some much smaller fraction have bouts of madness, and honestly no one has any idea why! 

There are theories about sleep but it's mostly Healers who've studied it, she could go look at books in the library on it. The current understanding is that memories end up near each other because of similarity, where the similarity can be on a number of aspects - place or time are one kind, but he suspects the rafting and the kiss were already near each other because they were both exciting, exhilarating experiences. 

He's not sure how to answer her question on kinds of things Mindhealers 'should' be able to do but can't, maybe because he's had such a long time to get accustomed to the reality of what's easy or hard or impossible; she has fewer preconceptions, maybe after this she could list out what she would expect and he can correct her? 

...There are ways a Mindhealer can incapacitate people but he wouldn't recommend she try that in self-defence this early in her training, unless she's literally about to die, it's a lot harder to undo than it is to do in the first place. Depending on when the trip is planned, though, she can ask him about it again later. He doesn't know whether one can awaken potential Gifts much less how. 

In terms of best practices for consent, the other thing to keep an eye on is whether people will feel like they have to say yes, either because they want to please her or think she'll be disappointed in them otherwise or are scared of the consequences if they aren't cooperative. Probably she doesn't have to worry about this yet, since she's a young trainee and he doubts her friends are worried about losing the friendship if they decline to let her practice on their brains, but it'll be something to keep in mind more once she's an adult and a trained Mindhealer. 

"Well, like, you said you can't just make people forget only one thing, why not? It seems like we should be able to. Can you tell in advance who's going to have a problem? What is the self defense thing, I won't try it. Why do we have metaphors at all, nobody else does with other gifts."

"- I will start with the last one first, because in a sense I think that many Gifts do have metaphors? Thoughtsensers often experience 'hearing' thoughts, but thoughts are not really sound, and some Thoughtsensers instead 'see' words written down. I have heard Empaths describe what emotions feel like to them as everything from a smell to a taste to the sense that they can half-feel the other person's body as well as their own. Mages see glowing lines of energy in the world, but a ley-line is not really a glowing river, and different mages see it differently! Some mages instead experience it as 'touching' magic, not visually at all. I also know of a Healer blind from birth who instead of Healing "Sight", has Healing-touch and Healing-smell. This becomes more obvious when Gifted people work together in larger numbers and learn concert-Sight and concert-work." 

"What's concert-work like?"

"The most common kinds are mage-work and Healing-melds. I am not sure I have ever actually heard of Mindhealers doing it; there are not really enough of us, and there is the question of patient confidentiality, which does not apply at all to mage-work and which Healers have different protocols around. The key part is that people must be in mental rapport with each other, but of a different kind from what Thoughtsensers do to either establish a formal Mindspeech link or to share thoughts more directly. Healers will often merge only their lower-level shields, in order to make their reserves a common pool, and then one Healer will use that to take charge and direct the energies into Healing a critical patient. Done skillfully with the right training, this does not require exposing one's thoughts to one's colleagues, though I think many rural Healers without that training find it easiest to just merge everything. Mages will more often also share senses with each other, since large workings are very complex as well as power-requiring, and require tight coordination of who will do what; the communication can be done either via formal Mindspeech with a conductor, or by thought-sharing, this is mostly a matter of preference and local practice." 

"Do people share thoughts when they're first practicing?"

"Probably it is not uncommon. I think I avoided it; I have done Healing-melds sometimes, since I see patients at the healing centre sometimes and the Healers can call on me as an extra body in an emergency, but I was already fully trained when I first started that, I suspect accidentally sharing thoughts is more common for Healing-trainees who need to learn melds in their first year." 

"Hmmm."

Lionwind waits for a moment to see if he has more, then rubs his forehead. "...I do apologize, could you remind me of your other questions? I seem to have gone off on a tangent here." 

She can go back and reread her previous questions to him.

"Hmm. So the question of memory blocking comes down to the fact that any one memory is linked to a huge number of other things in the mind, and - our Sight does not quite work in a way where a 'memory' is a particular object, that can be plucked out without affecting the rest. What you saw in my mind, the other day - my memory was not a gear, it was somehow held in the pattern of how the gears fit together. Trying to erase it by removing a gear would probably both not have worked that well and caused more extensive damage to nearby memories."  

"Huh. Yeah, that makes sense."

"In terms of predicting problems in advance - I think this was studied once, but it was by a Mindhealer who had...questionable ethics...and went around looking at everyone's mind at the academy where he worked, and then kept personal records on his predictions of who would have troubles later. And I have only heard of this secondhand, anyway, his work was never published in a treatise." He frowns, rubs his chin. "The risk for some problems does seem to run in families? Becoming addicted to drugs and sudden madness later in life, in particular, are more likely if someone's parent or sibling suffered the same problem." 

"Doesn't being addicted to drugs only happen if you actually take any ever?"

"I mean, yes, but if you include alcohol, most people will have some at least once in their lives, though of course most never become addicted. ...Also there is likely a factor that children with parents who drink or take drugs will likely have those drugs around in their homes. I am not sure if it has been well-studied whether children by blood, but raised elsewhere, still have the higher risk." 

"That would be interesting..." She writes it down. "If I have money later is it okay to pay people to let me look or to answer my questions - like if they don't mind it, and it would just be annoying to sit there waiting for me to see whatever I was looking for, I mean -"

"Oh. Hmm. I am not sure that is something where Mindhealers have a settled answer. Healers might, there are more of them and they sometimes want to study healthy patients for comparison and will pay them to sit still all afternoon for it. Many people feel more private about their thoughts than about their bodies, but Mindhealing Sight per se does not actually look at thoughts. I think it would be all right, but you would want to explain and get their opinion before telling them how much money, and be cautious of the fact that very poor people might think it worthwhile to make themselves very uncomfortable for twenty coppers."