This is a really weird scenario for Leareth's powerful Thoughtsenser to be stuck mindreading both participants! He is starting to come around to the view that Leareth's alien prisoner is, in fact, very attractive, but he's not really into that. Maybe he can ask for a turn later.

Leareth absently acknowledges various real-time reports, and works on writing up a list of questions to ask, even though APPARENTLY some of them are (magically? sex-magically?) metaphysically impossible for her/him/them to actually answer. 

Is she able to wiggle. She's going to be starting with such a handicap if she can't wiggle.

(She can wiggle! She soon can't seem to particularly use her hands to reach for anything on purpose, but her wiggling capability is entirely un-altered!) 

One of the many Gifts that Elfyn has recently collected - and, in fact, one of the first Gifts she collected, since Herald Dara was not at all difficult to persuade to fuck her - didn't really need encouragement at all, really - 

- but, anyway, one of her new Gifts is now unusually powerful long-range Foresight. 

This has not, up until this moment, particularly done anything. Long-range Foresight is finicky like that. It doesn't operate on demand. 

But suddenly, just as Nayoki is sitting back to survey her careful and thorough work, she sees. 

She sees a disorienting rapid-flicker of scenes, like a very badly edited video montage: 

 

Herald Savil, sprawled in snow, the red stain of her blood spreading around her. Herald Vanyel, sobbing over her broken body. 

 

Stef, older and thinner and haggard, fleeing desperately through a wintry forest. Sobbing, alone, until he trips and falls and lies in the snow. 

 

A dark-haired, cherubic little girl, hopping one-legged around a room, the bandaged stump of her other leg tucked up. A large, beautiful cat, watching fondly, with far too much sly knowing intelligence in its golden eyes. 

 

A young man she doesn’t recognize, tall and well-built, with flowing white hair, his features a little like those of the Kaled’a’in Scrollsworn she met (and failed to fuck) in Urtho’s Tower, but also different. Vanyel’s silver eyes look out of his young face, full of pain and rage and bitter despair, as he stares hopelessly over the lip of a crater. Ashes drift down from a cold unforgiving sky. 

 

Vanyel’s daughter Jisa, but several years older, and - wearing Heralds’ Whites? Standing before the King and his lifebonded, holding hands with the golden-haired heir to the throne of Valdemar, chin raised, as though daring the world to stand in her way. 

 

Vanyel, with Jisa at one side and Stef at the other, standing in a clearly artificial passage carved through mountains, cutting across a distance of half a mile, the impossibly smooth glassy walls rearing above his head. Looking up at a dark-haired, dark-eyed man clad in black, and speaking his name. “Leareth.” 

 

The white-haired young man with Vanyel’s eyes, standing in…a place that isn’t the physical world, and is like nothing she’s ever seen before. Dusty purple nebulas, swirling in a velvety darkness, like the darkest night sky but somehow deeper and more hollow. He stands on a path made of moonbeams, and faces a woman dressed in black, with Kaled’a’in features and - eyes that aren’t human at all. 

 

A crack like a giant’s hammer striking steel, the world turned to fire. 

 

Healer Shavri, inexplicably clad in an unfamiliar military uniform, running, her eyes piercing and bitter. Lissa at her side, her Guard uniform drenched in blood and gore. 

 

 

 

 

The mage who must be Leareth, pale and ashen and clearly badly injured, slumped against a wall in…what is recognizably a hallway in the Palace in Haven. Vanyel, his face smudged with soot and with ashes in his hair, bending to squeeze Leareth’s shoulder, and their eyes meet and, even without words, even without any context at all, it’s clear that this is goodbye. 

"Woah - oh - oh - shit - ugh you know it really should have occurred to me that long-range Foresight is just the superpower that the universe can fucking drop plot beats on you! I was advancing the plot! I did not need to see all the dead people!!!! I'm gonna seduce the supervillain! Come the fuck on!"

Nayoki had not actually, at that moment, been paying very close attention to surface thoughts! She was busy enough with just mage-sight and Mindhealing Sight. She has so little idea what just happened!  

Leareth’s Thoughtsenser cannot really help her out here! Foresight visions happen on a level distinct from surface thoughts and he is only slightly better-informed and, as a result, actually a lot MORE confused! And concerned! 

“You had a Foresight vision?” Nayoki manages after a few seconds. “What did you see? Who was dead?”

Stressed-out wiggling!! "Uh, Savil, dead. Stef, running around in the snow and falling over, ambiguously dead which probably means not dead if Foresight is, like, a movie trailer. A little kid with one leg, and I'm betting you don't have good prosthetics. Angry silver-haired guy looking despairingly at a crater. A...missile strike? No, there was something else before the missile strike - fuck - I haven't met most of these people - uh, Vanyel and Leareth had a good hurt-comfort moment at the end but it was definitely going for 'last goodbyes' not 'rebuild together'."

The Thoughtsenser is taking notes so frantically. 

This is not sexy content at ALL! Nayoki is kind of mad about it! 

"...Right. All right. You said - Herald Savil was dead? What were the circumstances - could it be natural causes, she is very old...? And you saw Leareth? Was there anything other than his - moment - with Vanyel? Which of them was hurt? Can you describe where they were?" 

This is not sexy! S/he's pissed about it! "Uh, at one point Vanyel and Stef and Jisa-still-too-young-to-fuck-but-older were walking into a - cave? A tunnel? And they yell "Leareth" at this guy, who looks ruggedly handsome enough to indeed be our Mister Dark, and who is flanked by grim silent bodyguards in a supervillainish fashion. ....the hurt-comfort moment's not there, it's in the palace in Haven and they both look badly beaten up."

"....In the Palace in Haven? Are you sure? - Just, I cannot imagine the circumstances that would result in Leareth going there willingly. There is a Heartstone on site and the Star-Eyed Goddess would have far too much power to murder him or worse!" 

The other part sounds like the pass in the north? Probably? Which...also doesn't actually make much sense, but it makes more sense than Leareth in Haven of all places. 

....The crater. A silver-haired man looking at it could be any Adept. A crater...could be caused by a Final Strike? More likely if it were Vanyel's Final Strike, and isn't Leareth going to be incredibly upset at that possibility... 

Leareth is currently receiving a very confusing and disjointed report and he's very worried about it! 

:I think I should perhaps be there in person to ask her– them: he sends to the relay-Mindspeaker. :I am going to Gate back to the facility: 

"Why now?" s/he's saying irritably to the ceiling. "This is the worst way to start on seducing Master Dark, he's going to be all freaked out and have questions about dead people. Why do you do this to me."

"Um," Nayoki says uncertainly. "Are you talking to me? I suppose it is possible the compulsion-work triggered the Foresight vision but I really did not do it on purpose!" 

A Gate goes up, several rooms away. Leareth steps through it. 

:Nayoki, is she - safe to be around -?: 

:Probably not! She is very thoroughly compulsioned not to harm you deliberately, though. I think the compulsions are still intact - one moment -: 

She checks this. They are. 

"Anyway Leareth is here and wants to speak directly with you," she says to Elfyn. It feels kind of unfair that her nice time is being so rudely interrupted, but it's true that Leareth needs more information, and an unexpected Foresight vision is nothing if not informative. 

"I'm not talking to you!" s/he's saying to Nayoki. "I'm talking to the [perfectly good explanation]! Sometimes if I call them out on their bullshit they'll do me a favor, make it up to me. And this was bullshit. - I can see Master Dark, sure, fine, whatever - AND HE HAD BETTER HAVE SOME FUCKING RIDICULOUS UNIQUE BONUSES!"

"You know, if you call him 'Master Dark' to his face he is going to– ...he will not actually get mad, I am not sure I have literally ever seen him angry, actually. I suppose he would be slightly bothered about it and not say anything." 

:Leareth, you can come in: 

"It is in his power to shut me up," s/he says cheerfully.

Leareth comes in. 

He looks...pretty much the same as in the dream, except healthier and less disheveled, and also much less dressed for a freezing northern winter; he's wearing a lightweight linen tunic over trousers, and they're not even black. 

He looks down at Elfyn for a moment, and then lets out his breath, just barely perceptibly, and squats down beside her on the stone floor. "So. Apparently you are from another world, have sex-related magical superpowers, and - believe you were sent on some kind of mission to seduce me and cause me to change my mind about plans of mine that could be considered evil? Is that a reasonable summary?" 

"Yes. No invading places. No raping people who my magic powers didn't pick out. Beat the swords into ploughshares. All that stuff. I won't make you, I'll just make you want to."

Leareth blinks at her. 

"...Honestly, I have no desire to rape anyone, even if your magic powers selected them? If that power is scalable it could be very useful for preventing certain bandit groups in the north from being pointlessly terrible, but it sounded as though your sex-related powers are interested in 'supervillains' and not bandits? Anyway. I would actually very much prefer not to invade Valdemar, and I am hoping if I learn your magic it will obviate the need to."

He's just going to ignore the part about ploughshares because it's very confusing and...probably metaphorical? 

"...cool, awesome. I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be trickier than that, but I'm happy to, uh, use my picnic basket of infinite brunch to feed your starving people so they don't have to invade Valdemar for the better land?"