...She's very likeable. And charming. Leareth notices this, and then - catches himself thinking it - is that the sex-related mind control? He...is not particularly noticing that he wants to do anything sexual with her. Just that she seems incredibly promising and high-value as an ally, and is also - admirable...? 

"I think Valdemar and Karse could use that, though it does not in itself solve my problem, unless it - can be modified to output infinite mage-energy instead of infinite brunch? Actually, I am confused about why your magic includes a picnic basket that produces infinite brunch! Is that something that you copied off a supervillain from your previous world that has different magic? It does not seem very sex-related." 

"Yeah, I got it from Gil. It was a side quest once I heard about Velgarth and was complaining about the prospective quality of the food in a medieval world. - I don't technically need to eat, but I like it. I can't get stuff from inventory while I'm aggressively restrained, though."

"...I see." He doesn't. "Who is 'Gil'? And what does it mean to - get things from your inventory? Do you need to be allowed access to your magic, to Fetch things here or something?" 

Leareth is also reading her mind in case this helps him make slightly more sense of any of this! 

She's mostly sizing him up. He's cute, but she thinks everyone is cute. He's - tense, on edge, probably because of the STUPID DEATH VISION. She's tracking how he reacts when she wiggles. 

"Uh, no, I just need to - plausibly have been able to grab it? But right now I can't move my arms, so, no can do. Gil is the dread necromancer of Whyliodor, and has been persuaded to be a somewhat less dread necromancer and stop releasing plagues so he can have more bodies for his efforts. I pointed out it doesn't even work in the long run..."

(Leareth is not noticeably reacting to her wiggles. His reactions period are very muted; his facial expression is mostly impassive, his eyes still unreadable pools. To the extent that she can read anything off him at all, he's reacting to the content of what she's saying to him. The offer to feed his starving people got a flicker of what might be respect or admiration; when she mentioned getting stuff from her inventory, his eyes narrowed very slightly in curiosity and maybe suspicion; her description of the dread necromancer and his plagues earned a very slight catch in his breath.) 

"I cannot imagine it would! I am not sure what 'necromancy' is but if you need human deaths to achieve a goal, plagues are going to be such a messy and uncontrolled way of going about it." 

He frowns, very faintly, and then eases himself to the floor and sits cross-legged beside her. 

"- Actually, I want to come back to that later. Nayoki tells me that you had a long-range Foresight vision that involved me, and also Vanyel. Was Vanyel -" pause, "- all right, in it? Or was he one of the dead people?" 

"He was alive in the hurt/comfort scene with you."

"The...hurt comfort scene? Which of us was hurt?" Are her thoughts any more informative than that. 

She's trying to recall the details. The hallway in the palace in Haven, the two of them staring soulfully at each other... "both hurt but you worse, I think."

What series of events could possibly lead him to end up in Haven of all places. Maybe if he had convinced Vanyel to shut down the Heartstone...? 

Leareth nods. "Thank you. I - was there any indication of how either of us might have ended up injured? I know that long-range Foresight visions are often very cryptic and the pieces of the future they show may not be in order or usefully connected, but do you have guesses?" 

"Well, there were some massive horrific explosions, so it might've been those. I'm also kind of expecting Urtho to come into play at some point and he's got all the horrifying superweapons? I am going to need to level 'disarm explosives with sex' a lot to handle those."

"I am not sure how Urtho could come into play because he died eighteen hundred years ago." 

(On a completely different note, what does 'disarm explosives with sex' even mean, her style of magic is so strange! Leareth cannot picture how this would work at all and he's not sure he wants to.) 

"- tragic backstory? You've never really trusted anyone since he betrayed you?"

"- Are you reading my mind?" Leareth asks, faintly. Though, actually, no, he doesn't think that's the explanation here. "Or - did Vanyel tell you whatever it is that he learned in Urtho's Tower...? Or are you guessing it because your sex magic gives you that ability? If that is the case then I have - even more questions than I already had -" 

Leareth is holding himself very still and breathing evenly, but it's still noticeable that he's somewhat shaken. 

"Vanyel doesn't tell me anything and I told him I'm fine with that because I hate having to make complicated decisions, it's horrible and I'm bad at it and I'm not a good enough person to put myself through it anyway. I knew it because this is my mission to seduce you, which is obviously going to involve solving your unresolved trauma, and you had a visible reaction to me mentioning Urtho, and then said 'he's been dead for eighteen hundred years' like someone who absolutely keeps track of how many years it has been."

"Actually I have not gotten the sense that you would be bad at making complicated or difficult decisions?" Leareth says half on automatic, while his brain is still busy processing the rest. 

Urtho. 

Leareth would not, before this, especially have said that there was anything left unresolved there. It's been almost two thousand years. He's thought through every part of (what he remembers of) what happened a hundred times. He's not confused about it, not really. It's just - sometimes you make a mistake, and the consequences are so much larger than you could ever have known, and it can never be undone, but the only thing to do from there is go forward. If that counts as 'unresolved trauma' according to Elfyn, then Leareth is confused about how she's even using that term.

(She says it like it's a standard protocol - like she makes a habit of solving all the problems in all of the worlds - and that makes her claim that she's "not a good enough person" even more inexplicable...) 

"I - do you want me to tell you about Urtho? Would that - make it more clear what your next steps on this quest are?" 

Attentive wiggle. "Yeah, tell me about Urtho."

...Is this conversation a good idea? Leareth dislikes being so unsure whether he's running his normal decisionmaking process and taking actions for reasons that make sense, or if he's being pulled in by the mind-affecting magic. Though he doesn't feel especially tempted - or tempted at all - to have sex with their alien visitor, which is probably a good sign? 

Anyway, he's already taken more precautions than are really necessary, and he's also delegated it to one of his other staff - not one previously involved in mindreading - to watch the room with Farsight, and call an alert if Leareth appears to be behaving in uncharacteristic ways. So, given all of that, he might as well do his best to focus on this conversation. 

"I - was born approximately eighteen hundred years ago, in a country which no longer exists but which was called Predain. ...I am immortal, which is not usual here, and my immortality setup - the one that survived the damage of the Mage Wars - has the downside that I lose much of my episodic memory between lifetimes. I keep written records, now, but any records of my first lifetime were lost in the Cataclysm. What I do know, is that as a young adult, after both of my parents died, I left Predain and travelled to the neighboring kingdom of Tantara, because I had heard that there was a mage-school there. Run by Urtho, who was one of the best-known mages of that time period..." 

Leareth really doesn't remember many details, here. He can fill in the outline, though, half of it based on what he could infer after the fact about what must have happened. He studied at Urtho's Tower. He was happy there, he thinks. But he knew that Predain was still broken, far worse off than Tantara, and that no one else would fix it, and so eventually he left. 

He remembers that he admired and respected Urtho. He thinks they exchanged letters, over the years. 

He doesn't remember how the war started. Leareth doesn't think he would have started it himself? There was no reason to; Tantara was fine, Tantara was prospering and flourishing, it didn't need reforms. 

He remembers a few snippets of his wartime tactics. The fear-artifact he used to empty the Palace, so that he could capture their capital with almost no deaths caused. He remembers that one of Urtho's generals could be bought, and he didn't like the man but he was willing to work with people he disliked, for his kingdom's future. 

Victory was near, he thinks. 

He doesn't, actually, remember dying. Only - waking up, later, amidst the ruins. He can't imagine that Urtho intended to cause so much destruction - he still doesn't know how or why it happened. 

(The past isn't over. The echoes of that first Cataclysm are on the distant horizon, and so he's working on a time limit, here. Leareth doesn't say this out loud, but the tension in his shoulders hints at it.) 

(Leareth misses Urtho. He doesn't say this either, doesn't even really think it, but it comes across in everything he says.) 

"Do you want a hug?"

Not really? That doesn't seem like it would solve any of Leareth's actual problems here?

(Also he is still slightly on-edge about being in the same room as the powerful magical alien who maybe has a life mission of stopping him from carrying out any of his plans.) 

"The problem that hugs solve is that sometimes one gets to feeling like the only person in the world, or the only person who has really seen it, or the only person who can really change it, and partially this is an assumption that requires actually responding to, but partially -

- so humans are, actually, made of meat, right, we're not brains in vats? We don't go around making the perfectly logical inferences in response to the inputs our senses get, we use patterns, we use patterns everywhere, and this isn't stupid, because there are patterns everywhere -

- there's a concept from my home world, actually, about taking books and making shorter sequences from which the whole book can be reconstructed. It's useful for pirating hentai, sue me. ...anyway, you can't compress a message that's made out of entirely random characters, not in a form that lets you rederive the whole thing. But a book - or a hentai but the reason it's true for the hentai is more complicated - isn't made out of random characters, there are tons of patterns in which letters happen more often or next to which other letters of what. So you can compress books a lot, because they're not random, they have patterns, you can learn the patterns. The ways that humans see the world in patterns is a completely sane thing to do, it is the right thing to do, if you can only think so much.

And a human who is never getting - hugs, never getting a massage, never falling asleep snuggling someone, never getting laid - okay some people are asexual but my supervillain isn't going to be - anyway, they're getting constant sensory input that they're alone in the world and no one's on their side and they're safe around no one and can trust no one. And they can override that, it's honestly only a little bit of a nudge, it's probably easy enough to adjust for if you have a lot of practice, but -

- that's what hugs are for, if you really never thought to wonder."

This is not related to anything but what is a hentai???? The Thoughtsenser still observing the magical alien's thoughts from outside the room did not know how badly he needed his life to include an answer to this question until now!!! 

Nayoki, still watching from a semi-flopped position in the corner of the Work Room, is utterly fascinated. Elfyn's entire speaking style just changed so drastically! She is really clearly not doing it on purpose, or not consciously on purpose, but it's - almost exactly what someone who had known Leareth for many years and had extensive practice in communicating him would say, if they were trying to convey what she is - 

"....I think maybe my concern here goes in the other direction?" Leareth says, eventually, after he's spent a full minute processing that speech. "I - do not want to have it be the case that my mind is pattern-matching from things such as hugs and - concluding that I am less alone - as a person in the world who is actually trying to achieve the goals and values I have - than, in fact, I am? ...I would really very strongly prefer to be less alone in that! I - have some hopes that you will be able to help, if not because you care about what I care about, then at least because you can teach me your magic and maybe that will give me different and better options. But I - hugging someone is not going to directly change any of that."