Oh gods what a relief. :Thank you!: 

You may try to Thoughtsense Vanyel about his sex life if you'd like, she tells Leareth. Also anyone else around to see if they're being monitored. She doesn't think the Healing-trainee is reading them; he doesn't have the acting skill. 

My prediction is that Vanyel has many admirers and too many Good neuroses to enjoy them. They fling themselves at him and he goes 'ah, but my heroic responsibility!' and they are left disappointed and lonely, while he feels righteously miserable. Want to bet?

:My bet would be that Vanyel refuses many young admirers because his personality is such that he prefers to have sex with people he sees as his equal? But that he has had at least two instances of excellent sex with people who he did see that way. ...Perhaps not recently, given that he is now a national hero with a dozen songs written about him: 

Leareth can't help smiling. :I wish you could have seen his face when I mentioned a new song of his heroic exploits during one of our conversations: 

Let me guess. He hates being famous because if you're Good having more leverage just means you're obliged to do more things, instead of meaning you have more resources with which to accomplish your goals.

:- Actually I think he mostly hates it because he is...shy? He feels self-conscious easily and does not like to be the centre of attention, and I think experiences many social interactions as draining. It is a - confusing and unfortunate personality trait, but I am not sure it is strongly related to his being Good?: 

Well, it's not a problem I've heard of anyone having in Cheliax.

:- Why would someone in Cheliax who felt that way literally ever tell you about it?: 

It's easier to change than to lie, over the long term. If someone in Cheliax felt like that they'd stop.

At the same time as this conversation is happening, Jisa is slipping quietly into the House of Healing. 

Melody is in her office with the door shut, which means that she's with a patient and busy. One of the young Heralds who Jisa doesn't know very well just left, looking oddly flustered; Jisa bumped into her outside the main doors and said a cheerful hello and got a mumble in response. 

She knows that Mama and Papa are busy having another meeting with Queen Karis - why do they even need to have so many meetings on the same day - and Uncle Van is doing things in the Web-room, and all the other important Heralds are accounted for (she might have possibly snuck around the Heralds' wing and the main meeting-room wing before planning this.)

Whatever is going on in the closed wing of Healers' is VERY SECRET and if servants aren't allowed in to change bedsheets then obviously nobody is going to let Jisa in. Which just means she needs to be sneaky. This is fine. Jisa is excellent at being sneaky. Most of the Healers shield well enough that she can't read their surface thoughts at all, but she can still see their minds, and hide when someone is coming and then time her sneaking for when they're not looking. 

...However, there are two blue-uniformed Guards blocking the hallway. She's not going to be able to get past them. 

That's fine. There's a storeroom at the other end of the hall, with a door to the outside, and it's probably locked but one of the reasons it took them so long to plan is that Stef knows how to pick locks (he's SO COOL) and he showed her and made her practice until she was reasonably fast at it. He said the locks on the doors at Healers' won't be very good. 

Jisa sneaks back out and around and - with a couple of pauses to duck into the bushes because she feels someone approaching on the path - picks the lock and gets into the storeroom.

At which point she ALSO has to pick the OTHER lock to get through the door into the hallway proper. And at one point a Healing-trainee comes around to get some herbs and she has to frantically hide in a cupboard. 

It's fine. She can do this. She hides and then slips out once they're gone and finishes picking the lock and then veeeery caaaarefully creaks the door a teeny bit open and peeks. 

The guards are not watching this direction. 

She slips through the door and shuts it as quietly as she can and then flattens herself against the doorframe of the nearest patient room. Which...has shields on it? For some reason? She's very sure it didn't have shields on it before. 

The room next to it doesn't have any new shields, and then the third room is the actual fancy shielded room for Herald-patients. Probably anything especially interesting is in there? 

Jisa checks with Thoughtsensing. There's no one in the middle room. 

She lets herself in, and sits down, and then reaches out with the one sense that isn't blocked by the permanent shields, because nobody every bothers to shield out Mindhealing. 

There are three minds in there! 

One of them is...a Healing-trainee, she's pretty sure? A vaguely familiar, young-feeling garden. 

One of the minds is incredibly strange! The layout is - how can she even describe it - Jisa can't see it perfectly, the shields make her Sight a bit hazy, but it's as though someone took a normal garden and paved it and then put plants on top in pots. It's very neat and organized and also bizarre. 

- and there's a heavy Mindhealing block on it. A kind Jisa doesn't recognize - it's not doing anything related to emotions, which is what almost all blocks are for, it's doing - something else... 

Something related to Gifts? Because this person clearly has Gifts. Mage-gift in particular, she thinks. 

The other mind also has a heavy Mindhealing block on it, but not related to Gifts; she doesn't have any. Her garden is - like the garden of the ambassadors, inwardly-pointed and walled. It's - in disarray. Someone has been running around frantically digging in it, uprooting healthy plants and leaving them scattered on the ground, and trying to nudge other plants towards faster growth in places where they don't quite belong. It looks like it was a very careful, complicated ecology before all the messing-around started and its current state is not stable. 

Aaaaaaaaaaa! That's really upsetting! Jisa doesn't like it at all!

...That kind of looks like Melody's Mindhealing work? She can't quite tell from here because her Sight is blurry through the stupid shields, but who else could it be, it's not like there are lots of other Mindhealers in Haven. 

Why is Melody DOING that to people. She's clearly HURTING them. That's wrong and bad! 

- she has to do something. 

All right. Think. What can she do. 

...Well, it's just a trainee Healer in there right now. And the two Guards at the door, of course, and maybe there's someone in the other room, but it's shielded so how would they know? 

The grownup Healers are all going to know that Jisa is definitely not supposed to be here, but the trainee maybe won't. If Jisa says very very confidently that Melody sent her to check on a Mindhealing thing. ...And maybe also pushes a bit with Empathy to make herself sound more convincing. 

Jisa takes a deep breath and then creeps back out to the door, pokes her head out, and checks that the guards are definitely looking the other way. And then pushes veeeery geeeently with Empathy just in case. Melody has made her practice control a lot. She's gotten good at it. 

She slips over to the other door and then politely knocks (very quietly) and tries to open it. 

It's not locked. She slips in and immediately shuts it behind her so the Guards won't hear anything. 

"Hi! ...Ellie, right? It's me, Jisa - Melody sent me to check on a Mindhealing thing." 

What. 

Carissa has Suggestion prepared but she hasn't fully thought through the 'maybe executed' angle here. 

Well, there's always not using magic at all and just trying to be very convincing.

She takes Leareth's hand and weeps into it, quietly.

Leareth checks his shields, first, and discreetly reinforces them.

And then curls a bit toward Carissa and tries to look miserable, not that this requires much in the way of acting; he's been suppressing and nudging away quite a lot of misery for the last however-many-days-it's-even-been. 

:- I have no idea why she is here!: he sends to Carissa, as soon as he's sure he has the directional shielding up tightly enough that the tiny Mindhealing student can't detect it. :I am almost certain that Melody would not have authorized it!: 

"I'll be right with you sorry," Jisa says in her best Kind Sympathetic Voice to the two Mindhealing-blocked people, and then smiles at Ellie. "How was your day?" 

"Ummm. I'm on for the night." Ellie yawns. "S'fine I guess? Wish I wasn't stuck all the way down here all night." 

"It's frustrating, isn't it?" Jisa is not even slightly going to let on that she has no idea what's happening here. "I need a bit for this, though - if you want to go step out for a minute, you could do that?" 

Ellie looks dubiously at her.

Maybe she can be EXTRA CONVINCING with some bonus Empathy? 

"- Er, if anyone asks just say a senior Healer's covering - I think the Heralds would've wanted Melody to come herself but she's soooooo busy with all of this going on and it's not fair." 

Oh wow that's so true, it's not fair at all, Ellie sympathizes so much - she doesn't feel like this assignment is at all fair to her, either...

"'Course. I'll be back in ten minutes?" 

And she slips out. 

Jisa shuts the door. And bolts it, just in case. 

Someone might get suspicious and so she had better be fast, and then be ready to hide or talk fast or something. Maybe she'll be able to think of the right something once she knows why this is even happening. 

She turns back to the two of them. "Are you all right? What - why did they do this to you - it's not right -"