:You can use it: Melody smiles at Kelta. :This is Leareth. He's decided to learn programming now that we're here and is apparently quite talented at it: 

"Cool! I would not have guessed that preindustrial visitors would be talented programmers."

:It's surprising! ...Well, I mean, I wasn't all that surprised, but that's mainly because I got all of my surprise about the entire way Leareth is as a person out of the way earlier. He's probably the best at magic out of everyone in Velgarth, but right now he can't– it's complicated. I'm actually not sure how much is just public about our situation or how much Dree explained to you when you agreed to come: 

"She mostly explained about you, since I'm here to talk to you."

:Ah. Well, he doesn't mind me explaining to people, so, short version is: there was a previous war, he played a big part in winning it but was captured and spent a few subjective years as a prisoner and had some very traumatic experiences. I think he's going to be fine eventually, but he has his projective mage-gift blocked for safety reasons. Also he might panic about something and hide under the table. And he's not trying to be rude, he's just likely to ignore you because strangers are stressful: 

"That's fine," says Kelta. "I didn't particularly notice he was ignoring me, I'm here for you and your magic therapy powers, those are cool as heck."

:They're really cool! I think I got the coolest Gift! Although I didn't know what it was for the longest time - I grew up in a small town and they don't have good testing for Mindhealers since we're so rare - and in hindsight I could easily have really screwed up. Fortunately I guess I got lucky: 

"You need testing for it?"

:It's the best way to confirm! But only mages can do it for any kind of Gift, and they need to be trained in it. To be clear, I knew I had a Gift at all, it was pretty damned obvious, but the Healer who assessed me had only ever heard stories about Mindhealers, so she decided I probably just had extremely powerful Projective Empathy. She hadn't worked with an Empath before either, so I was trying to teach myself out of books. Later on it suddenly made a lot more sense why the books were so unhelpful!: 

"What does Empathy do?"

:Emotions, roughly, though if someone has it very strong they can sometimes pick up or send images - it starts to overlap with Mindspeech that way, which tends to happen with the similar Mind-Gifts, someone with strong enough Thoughtsensing can start to pick up or send emotions a little. It's an interesting case because for whatever reason, we see the receptive side occurring in isolation much more than with other Gifts. I've read about cases of Thoughtsensing without projective Mindspeech but there've been none in living memory, but it's actually quite common for regular Healers to have only receptive Empathy without the ability to project. ...I have a bit of both, myself, but it's my weakest Gift by far: 

"Gosh. I would think that what you're saying about your Mindhealing would be really hard to confuse for something that just did emotions, but maybe I'm visualizing it wrong."

:I mean, the book didn't really specify what sensing emotions was supposed to feel like! And it does vary between people, and a lot of Receptive Empaths don't experience it as much like their own emotions, more like - colors, or smells. Though I do think I should have been more confused about the fact that I could make people hallucinate, which is not strictly speaking an emotion: 

"- it is not! Are these fun hallucinations or not so much?"

:They're not inherently scary or anything but I think whether they're fun depends if someone has advance warning and wants to experience it! It's mostly visual distortions and - synesthesia, is that something people ever get here? The thing where you can taste colors and see sounds or whatnot. For whatever reason it's extremely easy to do this by accident when you don't know how to use the Gift yet. I used to do it for fun with my best friend - you can do it on yourself too - but my student accidentally did it to one of my patients once, when her Gift first activated, and he was very displeased: 

"People do sometimes have more or less synaesthesia of various kinds here, yes. If you were hurting for ways to make money you could probably sell synaesthesia trips but as it is I doubt that's the best use of your time."

:Probably not! It has the advantage of being fast, but it's still tiring to do a whole lot, and also I have to go back and undo it once they've had enough, I don't know if it would wear off eventually by itself but nobody's ever waited long enough to check: 

"Oh, hm, how does your stamina for this compare with stamina for doing work at all, are you likely to run out of the former before the latter?"

:I haven't usually had that issue in the past? At least, not since I was in my twenties. And up in the night with babies, I do love them but they're monsters when they're small -:

Melody is going to stop thinking about her children right now. Because Valdemar is at war, and while none of her kids were settled in Haven or anywhere especially nearby, she doesn't actually know that they're safe. 

:Anyway, lack of sleep is bad for energy reserves, which is what you need to work with Gifts, and when it runs low you get tired. It's possible to give yourself a reaction-headache if you push it hard enough, but that mostly happens to mages, I've had it, oh, half a dozen times since I turned thirty, mostly during the war Valdemar had with a neighboring kingdom seven or eight years back, and it wasn't even all that bad. I probably had less in reserves when the little ones were disrupting my sleep. You learn to be more efficient with experience, too, do the same thing with less effort. Then again, I was usually spending a candlemark or two with each patient, and half or more of that on getting the history and planning out what I needed to do:

She frowns and tugs at her ear, thinking. :It sounds like here it'd make sense to go in really hard on getting other people to do that and prioritize which patients I see so I can treat more of them, in which case I might end up getting too tired to keep going after only seven or eight hours. But right now I wouldn't be entirely comfortable leaving Leareth alone that long anyway, and I'm not sure if it's a good idea to send patients over here: 

"Okay, so a little longer than a standard shift," nods Keltra, "but not quite a one-and-a-half."

Melody blinks at her. :What, really? How long is a standard shift?: 

"- six hours? But people who are trying very hard to save money or really like their job often do an extra half or even a double, and sometimes people don't have to be actively working their whole shift and are on standby, that's common to do as a double."

:Huh. That's - pretty nice, I guess. I think our candlemarks are pretty close in length to your hours - we did not have good enough timekeeping in Velgarth for me to be sure one way or another, especially since I didn't prioritize packing any time-candles - but anyway the Healers all did twelve-candlemark shifts, one for day and one overnight. I didn't generally need to work nights but there was always a lot to do - I eventually started planning gaps in my scheduling so that I could fit in emergency patients without ending up there for sixteen hours a day, I can do sixteen hours once if I must but I start getting very cranky and that makes it hard to be professional. I was really hoping I could eventually get together more of a proper Mindhealers' Collegium in Haven, and have literally anyone else to trade off with me and cover overnight emergencies, but that didn't happen before I got pulled away: 

"- wow. All that and you were taking your own histories?"

:...I mean, that's why I needed at least a candlemark with each patient, and eventually I learned to block in two for anyone complicated because when I didn't do that it would inevitably go over anyway. And of course during the stupid war practically everyone I saw was in some way complicated. So if I was doing twelve hours a day that was still only eight or nine patients. That also included time to catch up on notes, although not very much so I mostly got very good at taking notes during a session without being awkward about it: