:Weird! I - don't think I've ever heard of anyone having that problem in Velgarth. I guess maybe we just don't have the drugs where it's a side effect...: Shrug. :I expect I'd be able to see them - I'm nearly sure that at least one out of me or a Healer could see them, depending on whether it's more of a low-level physical phenomenon or a higher-level mental one. Though the distinction isn't always that clear cut, hmm... Do people get dazzle-headaches here? The very horrible kind of headache that makes you sensitive to light and comes with nausea, and some people get weird hallucinations from it too. It's something that shows up to both Healers and Mindhealers, while it's happening - and I think susceptibility to them shows up to me even if the patient isn't actively having one, though I never really saw enough cases to be sure: 

"People do get those, yes! Can you cure them?"

:Healers can sometimes interrupt one in progress, if it's just barely started. I...might be able to do something to change the susceptibility, for someone who has a very strong pathway where stress will trigger a dazzle-headache? I don't know exactly how I'd do it, though, I remember musing about this in the past but I never had the time to experiment with it. Or a volunteer to experiment on: 

"There are some migraine drugs, which work for some people and not for others, maybe you can help figure out why and what could be done to develop better ones."

:Plausibly! I definitely feel a lot better about getting involved in obscure research if my role is just looking and not actively doing Mindhealing to people. I mean, it's still definitely something where I'd want the patients to understand what they were opting into, since it's invasive of their privacy, but it doesn't have the risk of my making a mistake: 

"I think migraines are one of those things that can make people really desperate. Oh, or suicide headaches, those are worse."

Melody looks very concerned! :What...are 'suicide headaches'? It sounds very bad!: 

"They are! Some people just get headaches much much worse than migraines out of absolutely nowhere!"

:Yeeeesh! I...don't know if I'd be able to help with those, but I'd be pretty motivated to try! Especially if there are any existing studies with drugs that might help. - Oh, er, a question I should ask is whether there's a good way to search for scholarship that's in progress, other than just - hopefully typing words in the normal search thing?: 

"Hm, there's a good way to search for published studies but I'm not sure there's one about stuff still in progress..." He pokes around. "Oh, this wasn't around when I was practicing - here you go, preregistration site."

:Neat! Yes, I think that's roughly what I was wanting:

Melody will carefully write down the directions for how to get there (with pen and paper, in Valdemaran except for a couple of spelled-out Kayshu words). 

:Er, was there anything you'd especially wanted to ask me about?: 

"I'm really curious about your world, or, uh, worlds, but not in a professional capacity really -"

:Fair enough to be curious, though! I don't have a burning need to do anything right after this, so I can tell you a few things, though I guess I should really at some point answer questions for someone who can write up an explanation of them, so I'm not going over the same things eighteen times. Or I could wait until I'm good at writing, but I expect I'll be comfortable speaking the language and answering emails a long time before I feel ready to write a whole treatise in it. Anyway. What sorts of things are you curious about - our magic, our countries and governments, our history, our non-magical scholarship, other things...?: 

"I was thinking the animals and the state of education."

:Ooh, animals. We have dogs and horses too. We also have lots of kinds of birds, including - I think it was a crow I saw before carrying something? There are some pigeons that you can train to carry messages, but I'm going to guess they're not as smart as your birds. Er, we have cattle and sheep and goats and pigs and chickens, as the most common farm livestock. There are also some magically-altered species that are much smarter - the Tayledras are a people who live in small clans in a region called the Pelagirs, where the land is badly damaged and dangerous, and they have birds which have a bit of Mindspeech and can also form minor soulbonds with scouts, I say 'minor' because I don't think it's too traumatic for the scout when their bondbird dies. And there are created races which are even smarter than that, comparable to humans - hertasi were created from lizards, gryphons were created from - several composite species, I think, presumably including a bird and a mammal of some kind. We thought until recently that they might be extinct but apparently they aren't -: 

A flash of pain. Grief. When Vanyel's Tayledras allies scried Haven, there were gryphons stationed in the ruins, bearing Iftel's standard. And even despite the awful circumstances, she suspects Vanyel was a little bit relieved, to learn that their species had survived the Mage Wars. 

"...soulbonds?"

:Huh. I hadn't thought of them as magic exactly, but I guess it makes sense that you don't have them - and the most interesting effects involve Mind-Gifts. There are a few different ways that people - or not-exactly-people in the birds case - can bond to someone. Companions are intelligent magic horses that we think were created as a direct miracle by a god, it's a long story, but anyway they Choose and bond to humans and that's how the government of Valdemar is selected. Lifebonds are another one, they're - deeper, and usually romantic, and neither party generally has much of a choice about it, it's just - some sort of soul-compatibility. We think they happen when the gods are meddling directly. People generally don't survive losing their Companion, though it's been known to happen. We know of exactly one person who's ever survived losing a lifebonded partner, and it's probably only because a Companion chose him right after it happened: 

Melody is trying to speak neutrally on the topic, but there's still a hint of distaste, even slow-simmering anger, in her mindvoice. 

"That's... well, that's pretty fucked up, it's all romantic to put it in a novel but..."

:No, no, I think you're absolutely right:

"You can't unpick them from your tapestry thing?"

:....Huh. For some reason I'd never considered that. I really doubt I could do anything about a lifebond - I don't seem to be able to do all that much about a broken one. Possibly I could break a Companion-bond if I tried really hard, they're - less fundamental, and the Companions themselves can choose to undo them. I doubt it would be very good for the subjects: 

"Ugh. I was maybe imagining more - surgical precision, but I suppose you can't necessarily take all the time in the world before it's all over the mind, can you."

:I can do more precision on smaller things than that. Or anything that's not - self-correcting, where everything between the starting state and the goal is stable. I don't think half-bonds stay that way, I think they try to snap back to a full bond. And then at some point probably just...snap: 

She shakes her head. :Also, the main limitation as a Mindhealer is my own skill and finesse. I bet there are all kinds of things that I could do with the Gift, if there were an established technique, but we don't have much in the way of research into it, and - for the obvious reason, experimenting with it is fraught: 

"I bet. You could probably get some volunteers who had terminal illnesses? If they weren't the sort to be signed up for cryonics."

:.....Signed up for what?: Melody is not even slightly making sense of the thought-concept behind that unfamiliar word.