"I don't mind practicing while you're here but you really really have to not look, I have to concentrate so I can't just count or anything."

"I promise I will not look," Lionwind says, seriously. "I will shield fully and not use any of my Gifts at all until you tell me you are ready." 

"Thank you," says Aza. And she peels apart the eggshell and puts it back together.

Lionwind waits, revealing no sign of impatience on his face. 

She does this a few times, tapping on it from the inside as though to hatch, and finally has one she's satisfied with. "Okay."

Lionwind tests her shield again; the poking is still quite noticeable, and disconcerting, but not too hard to hold off. He smiles at her. "Perfect. Keep doing it exactly like that." 

"Oh good. Thank you."

"Maybe now we can go on with our usual lesson, and next time I will plan a lesson for you on formal Mindspeech protocols?" 

"Yes please!"

And they go back to Mindhealing! 

Over the next few months, Lionwind teaches Azabel the basics of holding a Mindspeech link and communicating with other Mindspeakers without leaking accidental thoughts through in either direction, and he also has her practice Thoughtsensing on him - with his insistent consent - since he says that sometimes patients will actively request this. 

It turns out that she does have a much stronger Mindspeech Gift than his, so he sends her for some extra tutoring with a powerful Mindspeaker, his childhood friend Summerhawk k'Leshya, now also on and off an instructor at the Tower. Summerhawk is less patient as a teacher, and less thoughtful about what she seems to consider Azabel's unreasonable aversion to ever leaking thoughts by accident, but she's very well trained as a Mindspeaker and can explain it fairly clearly. 

When Azabel is twelve, Lionwind has her start sitting in on sessions with a handful of his patients who agreed to his student being present. At first he just has her observe, occasionally making comments to her in private Mindspeech, but after a while he starts inviting her to use her Sight and ask the patient questions to understand what's going on for them, and after six months of that, even to sometimes do basic Mindhealing techniques. Which he uses sparingly, only a couple of times per session and sometimes not at all. 

He continues to have mostly praise for her. She's a very diligent student, and smart, and she has a lot of original ideas which tend to be pretty good. 

Skan moves to the senior division of the gryphon flying classes. He does competitions nearly every week, and brings home prizes for most of them. He still struggles a lot more with academics than athletics, but nonetheless he's apparently doing better than nearly all of his gryphon classmates. He thinks this is because Azabel is the SMARTEST and the BEST. 

Azabel is very glad she could help!

She's curious about what gryphons who didn't happen to be introduced to her by hertasi when she was little are like. She is also curious about hertasi. And people from all different places. There are a lot of things people don't know about why minds are how they are! And some of it is probably by species but to make sure she has to check, and she may as well check lots of other things, ask lots of questions.

The hertasi are politely bemused by all her questions but are happy to answer them anyway! Gryphons are less inclined to constant helpfulness, but Skan recruits some of his friends and his parents to the project. Of the human population, the students at Healers' are the most inclined to participate; they're always trying to find people to study too, they get what it's like and don't find it weird, and some of them can recruit parents and acquaintances too. 

Hertasi almost universally have their attention very oriented to other people! Plenty of humans are set up that way, too, but nowhere near the majority. On average, hertasi get bored less easily when doing repetitive tasks like tidying or cooking than humans do, and tend to instead find them soothing and satisfying. They're novelty-seeking in their own way, though, most often showing up as a relentless curiosity for social information and gossip, but the hertasi with Gifts, or those who work as scholars, often end up at the top of their field, they tend very good at obsessive study. They also don't have a trait that many humans and gryphons do have, of feeling most at ease with their own species; they're basically never racist. They also almost entirely lack privacy intuitions, between each other, and find Azabel's meticulous insistence on explaining what she needs consent for and what she won't ever tell anyone else to be charming but odd, and why shouldn't they have three of their friends there to all answer questions about their brains at once? 

Skan is unusually straightforward for a gryphon, but on average their minds do seem more all-on-the-surface than humans. They're less often people oriented, and very likely to share Skan's traits of being very good at situational awareness and reacting quickly to new information, especially in physical combat. They tend more competitive and to some extent more aggressive than humans, and far more than hertasi, though it's a little unclear how much of this is culturally conveyed. They are not, in general, all that patient, which includes patience with Azabel's questions; Skan is an exception, but even he has a short attention span for how long he'll sit still for it, unlike the hertasi who will delightedly gossip about themselves and their feelings to her all day. 

Humans from different parts of the world don't seem to vary much on average in terms of how their gears look to Azabel's Sight, but there is a lot of variation in how they answer her questions; people from some cultures, especially north, tend not to talk much about their emotions, or even to have the same vocabulary for it that Azabel does. People from the far south, Acabarrin or something, often use metaphors to do with their bodies, saying 'my stomach felt heavy' instead of 'I was sad' and suchlike.  

This is all terribly fascinating! Since individual variation is just as interesting as group variation she will not run out of material any time soon. She writes up a little something aping the style of formal papers about the emotion-vocabulary thing and turns it in to Lionwind to see what he thinks.

Lionwind is so pleased with her! She could probably actually publish this as a short treatise, he thinks, if they do enough back-and-forth work on it, he can give her a round of suggestions? And then at some point she'll want to find a full-time scholar willing to review it for her, he hasn't published anything himself so he won't know all the expectations for style and footnotes and such. 

Sure, that sounds great!!

They can work on that, then! Lionwind makes suggestions of cases where she may want to collect more data, add different questions, cover the question from several angles in the usual tradition of scholars. 

After she gets her second draft back to Lionwind, she receives a short but courteous note from Urtho personally, congratulating her on her independent scholarship, it shows great promise. 

Skan thinks this is amazing and he wants to brag about it to all his friends and he's so jealous! 

He is more than welcome to brag about her. Skan is very good.

Skan is of the opinion that actually Azabel is very good! (...Maybe someday if he wins enough of the flying competitions, Urtho will send him a personal note of congratulations... He's definitely never going to get one for academics.) 

...

Life goes on. Azabel has lessons and works on her interviews and her treatise write-up and goes flying with Skan. Her teachers, and the scholar who volunteered to review her treatise draft for her, have a lot of praise for her. 

She's acquired a bit of a reputation among the other students training Mindspeech, at this point, as the girl who HATES MINDREADING and is always very very careful when practicing Mindspeech links to shield so hard. Mostly they're respectful about this, though she gets occasional eyerolls. 

At some point Skan warns her that he overheard some gossip from other gryphons he flies with, who sometimes play betting card-games with the older mage-students, some of whom are BULLIES and think that her aversion to mindreading is hilarious and he thinks some of them are Thoughtsensers? Anyway he just wanted to make sure she knew, so she can keep an eye out. 

Well, that's good to know. She knows how to do set-commands and it'll serve them right if they have to stand there waiting for her to unpick them after, if anybody attacks her.

Skan thinks she is totally right and they would DESERVE it and then no one would ever dare bother her again! (He is perhaps slightly wishing in the back of his mind that someone does try, just because it would be so cool if Azabel WON a FIGHT with Mindhealing, but he knows this isn't a very nice thing to think, and doesn't bring it up.) 

She doesn't know who any of the bullies are, which makes it hard to avoid them on purpose, but no older boys try to follow her over the next week. 

- at some point, though, she's walking along a perfectly innocent path in the gardens, with no one nearby, and suddenly there is a VERY HARD POKE at her shields, it doesn't quite penetrate on the first probe but it's enough to hurt and there's another poke right on its heels. 

:Don't: she returns, stumbling on the path when she tries to spin to see who's there.