Leareth has very little idea what Vanyel actually did during his year of investigation, but these recent reports are not reassuring! 

He is still reluctant to intervene in Haven - he knows that he's missing so much context, and where things stand with Vanyel is potentially promising but also messy and it's a particularly bad time to interrupt - and so he invests in sending additional spies, and obtaining quicker-turnaround reports despite the cost and risk, but other than that he watches and waits. 

(The Heralds are apparently very distracted. Leareth's spying activities go entirely unnoticed.) 

...It's now a full month after the deadline for the end of Vanyel's grace year, and the dream still hasn't reappeared. 

(Reports of Vanyel in Haven claim that he looks...happy? And well? And is still often seen in the presence of the inhumanly beautiful man/woman/gender-indeterminate-stranger who has been attracting so much attention and rumor.) 

(Leareth does not find this especially reassuring.) 

Previously: 

"There's something you haven't thought about," murmured the Evil Sorceress throatily once she recovered the ability to speak. Her hair fell exquisitely against her silk pillows, even when tangled and sweaty as it now was. She was very distracting to look at.

There probably was something I hadn’t thought about. There's no stat for evil genius, and I'm not one. I just make evil geniuses fall at my feet. 

"Oh?" I said, running my hands through that miraculously untangled hair, slightly annoyed with her for feeling the need to do a plot beat now rather than in the morning once we'd both slept and showered.

"If you're assembling a harem of supervillains, what do you think that makes you?"

Ah hah, one I actually had an answer to. "It makes me,” dramatic pause, “the Erogamer."

She scowled in confusion.  

People usually do. 

I have to get our relationship level quite high before I'm able to tell them and they're able to hear it. I felt bad about that at the beginning, but, well, I just actually as a matter of fact don't want all my hot sex to feature people freaking out about the existential implications of me. If that's what you're into, I guess you're off having your own Erogame somewhere with massive walls of text about multiverse theory and ethics and simulation hypothesizing, and more power to you.

Me? I want to seduce your guards and steal the keys off them while they're lost in orgasm and shimmy my way up to your tower and let you apparently catch me and take me and corrupt me to evil...and use my sex powers to bend all your magic against you and then give you an experience that melts your cold cold supervillain heart and mends your ways. 

With, you know, some variation, so I don't get bored, it's okay if every once in a while things go way off track and we end up in exile on a tropical island while crossdressing as your nephews. But it doesn't have to get deep, you know what I mean? In my heart of hearts I just want to fuck a lot of supervillains and assemble the multiverse's coolest harem, and the Erogame knows what's in your heart of hearts, so it doesn't let my latest additions get sidetracked by knowledge of the Erogame. And it doesn’t let me use my powers to end global hunger or whatever, because I don’t actually want to sexily end global hunger, I just feel shitty when I think about how I don’t.

....fuck, shit, now I was dwelling on this, and I'd been at this long enough to know what dwelling meant. 

"What did it sound to you like I said,” I said resignedly into the silk pillows.

The Evil Sorceress raised an eyebrow at me. Her makeup had gotten all smudged but the eyebrows were as perfect as ever so I guess they’re just naturally like that.  "You said, 'it makes me the, pause, satisfying rejoinder that ends the conversation'."

"- what, in those words?"

She frowned. Bit her lip. She had stunningly sexy lips. "Wouldn't swear to it. Or I would, but only because I like betraying my oaths and stabbing people in the back."

"No more of that," I said firmly. "I don't tolerate that in my harem."

"You can't make people do what you want by fucking them, sweetheart." And when I opened my mouth to indignantly object - "Or, you can, but it makes you a supervillain. Which is what I was saying."

"- okay, you know what," I said, "I acknowledge that the next plot beat is me grappling with the power I have, blah blah blah, I've admittedly been putting it off for months at this point, if I'm being completely honest with myself I figured I was inviting it when I took the 'assemble a harem of supervillains' quest in the first place, but in the fucking morning. After I've had a hot shower, and an incredible brunch, and also it'd better be the most goddamned self-indulgent stupidly romantic plot you've ever put on. It should feature princesses. And cute boys who are very sad and also horrifically injured and have to be slowly nursed back to health. And that perk I passed up when I took down the Terrible Lord, the one where I can copy magic off everyone I fuck, and...twelve different kinds of magic, minimum. And horses. Magic horses."

"Are you talking to me," said the Evil Sorceress.

"Nah, trying to get a quest," I said. The quest dialogue hadn't showed up. 

"I don't know what the fuck that is," she says, "but if you want to go to Velgarth I'll get you a portal in the morning."

"Velgarth?"

"Princesses, sad boys, twelve kinds of magic, horses? You want Velgarth."

Aaaaaand there's the quest text. 

>> Go to Velgarth

>> Fuck the supervillain

>> ?????????

>> No more moral dilemmas

"Fuck yes, no more moral dilemmas!" I said. "I got a quest to not have to deal with moral dilemmas anymore. Hell yes. It's going to be a bitch of a quest, but I would have sex with a thousand tentacled things from beyond time if it means I can stop having any moral dilemmas at the end of it - you know this place? Planet? Fantasy kingdom? Do they have good brunches there?" 

"Nope. It's medieval. No one does high tech and magic horses."

"I can compromise on the horses."

"If you just want brunch I know of a magic picnic basket that refills at the will of the true owner. This asshole necromancer across the Stormy Sea has it."

>> Get a picnic basket of infinite brunch for your journey to Velgarth

>> Add harem member: Gil, Master of Death

"- okay, great, stop giving me quests until morning." I said. 

"As you wish, noble heroine."

>> truly earn the title 'noble heroine'

"AAAAAAAARRRRGH!"

He plans the kidnapping very carefully, with input from Nayoki and various other specialists on his staff. He doesn't want to cause any unnecessary conflict between Vanyel and the other Heralds, but something very strange is happening and Vanyel is (deliberately, or so it seems) continuing to block their only avenue of communication. 

The attractive stranger is apparently trying to seduce the senior Mindhealer in Haven. Or something. He's been observed in public in her presence, and the servants in the Healers' wing report seeing him walking her back to her suite. 

And so, 42 days after Vanyel's return to Haven, the usual chambermaid for the Healers' quarters is replaced by one of Leareth's people, and she's new at her job and still awkward and so she knocks and asks to come in when Melody is still sitting and drinking tea with the exotic visitor - 

Melody is having a pleasant albeit confusing evening, and she's only a little bit annoyed about the chambermaid, and then - 

- what? 

There is a Gate up in under a second (anchored on the "chambermaid"'s magical talisman worn on a necklace under her Palace uniform) and then one of Leareth's Fetchers is poking her head through and in another half-second the beautiful stranger sitting across from the stocky middle-aged red-haired Mindhealer is on the other side of the Gate and then the Gate is down. 

- and even as this is happening, Leareth short-range Gates himself out of the sealed and thoroughly shielded underground Work Room, because he isn't stupid, and he reaches for his scrying-focus to watch what happens next. 

Quest Log:

So, it's been two days since the Vanyel quest wrapped up with convincing Vanyel to accept the affections of his reincarnated lifebonded, Stef, and then solving some of their incipient relationship issues with a couple of threesomes, and now I'm - kind of looking for main-quest plot hooks? Like, not that the Vanyel stuff wasn't a delightful diversion, it was great, I should look for more gay tragic heroes with horrible injuries, but -

- the supervillains aren't usually this hard to find, you know? Eastern Empire is the obvious candidate but this is a no-fast-travel-anywhere-you-haven't-already-been world and also someone should really have had a name and dark anecdote about the Emperor/Empress by now. You shouldn't really introduce a character this central this late.

The obvious alternative is that I have already been introduced to them, but pickings seem thin. Randi is slowly dying, which could be a Grima Wormtongue kind of situation with Savil presumably the party at fault, but I've hung around for a while and gotten no openings to fuck either of them. Not Katha or Tran either, and Kilchas and Sandra wanted setting up with each other but it barely took a nudge. 

None of the horses will fuck me either, and I'm pretty sure you can't have magic horses like that and then have them totally tangential to the plot.

Eventually, in desperation, I told Vanyel I was looking for a supervillain. Vanyel, who is a terrible actor, got a faraway look in his eyes and then abruptly changed the subject. Promising!!! But when I asked around about whether his whole family was killed by some evil emperor the answer was that they were all still alive, and he was estranged from them probably about the homophobia thing, which -

- okay, okay, period-typical sexism and homophobia, kind of what you sign up for when you go for a fantasy kingdom, except they're not Christian they're Vague Polytheists and I think homophobia comes from Christianity. In, you know, the real world, the one that's not an erogame backdrop, the one I left because I wasn't actually enjoying watching it turn into one. 

....anyway. I have one other lead. I fucked a curly haired kinda pompous dude I met at the bar the other day, mostly as a reward for not sexually harassing me for twenty entire minutes (not that I judge people for that, but you know, you gotta reward going above and beyond) and that got me 'subquest: welcome to the neighborhood'. Tried to find him again the next night but no luck. 

I am starting to get bored.

Quest Log part 2: 

- abruptly I am not bored!!!!!!!!!

The incredibly pretty young woman scrambles to her feet and pumps her fists in the air in triumph. "There we go!" she says with some satisfaction. "Come out, come out, wherever you aaaa-re, I don't bite. Unless you're into that."

......Leareth is not sure what he was expecting here but it definitely wasn't that! 

She's in a stone-walled windowless room that somehow feels very deep underground, over and above all the visible indicators of undergroundness.

There are also half a dozen very serious-looking people arranged in fight-ready stances around her. 

...Leareth's Fetcher is so confused he was pretty sure this person was a very attractive man but now they - she - are definitely not?? How is someone even that hot. This is unreasonably distracting. 

Leareth is not that distracted but it maybe helps that he's half a mile away and also very tense and stressed. 

:Ask - her? - where she is from and what she was doing in Valdemar: 

"...I...umm...where are you from and what were you doing in Valdemar?" 

" - oh, are we doing an interrogation, huh? You're going to need more men. Possibly an entire army."

Aaaaaaaaaaaah what is he supposed to say or do about that. 

That's also not a response Leareth was particularly expecting, but again he's not sure what he was expecting, and it's not as though he actually needs her cooperation in order to get some answers (though it would be convenient.) 

:Nayoki: he sends. :Please arrange to be within minimum range while still outside the room, and read her thoughts for me: 

And to the staffperson in the room, :- Tell her that we are not intending to harm her: 

Nayoki Gates herself to the hallway just outside the Work Room. She's keyed to the shields on it and she's a strong Thoughtsenser; she turns that Gift as well as her Mindhealing onto the strange visitor. 

"We're, um, not intending to harm you," the Fetcher says, trying very hard not to fidget visibly. 

"What, not even a little bit? What if I'm very badly behaved?"

Her thoughts are - ranking the six men by who she thinks will be the first to point out they have a helpless captive and have sex with her, apparently. She is not distressed by this and is in fact thinking maybe she wants to once she's identified him flirt with him particularly because witty quipping isn't her forte when it's not foreplay, heh heh, that's some wordplay in her native language.

Nayoki relays this to Leareth. 

Leareth is not really less confused! 

He does still need to decide what to do about his confusion, though. 

:Ask her about Vanyel: he sends to the Fetcher in the room, less because he's expecting an honest out-loud answer and more because it might, maybe, steer her thoughts in a more informative direction. 

"We just want to know what your interest was with Herald Vanyel," the Fetcher says, staring at the floor. "You were - seen with him quite a lot." Albeit while, apparently, being a BOY instead of an absurdly attractive GIRL. 

"And you're wondering, am I a whore, who flings herself recklessly at men with no thought of the consequences, so desperate for them I can't bear to wear clothes that'd take time unbuckling? Look at me! Is that what you're wondering?"

Unbelievably, this is also what she is thinking, except she thought 'unzipping' and corrected to 'buckling' because zippers haven't been invented yet.

This was really not what he was wondering, actually! Why is this the conversation he's having right now! Why is this his life right now??!! 

Nayoki spends several seconds involuntarily snickering, and then relays this to Leareth. 

...Huh. Leareth is suddenly very curious about "zippers" and why exactly they're harder to invent than buckles! Inconveniently there's no good reason to ask about this without revealing that they're reading her thoughts, which he doesn't want to do just yet. 

He's still - not exactly sure what to do next. 

:Maybe just give it a minute or two: he sends to both Nayoki and his staff in the room. :Wait and see if her thoughts are more informative: 

Sure okay he can stand here being AWKWARDLY SILENT for a minute??? ....He's pretty sure that he is normally much better at professionalism than this, but to be fair he does not normally in the course of his job duties need to interact with people who are inhumanly hot and also.......like this in conversation. 

She reaches out to trail her fingers down Talking Dude's cheekbone, very gently, since he still seems scared. 

"Is there a problem?" she asks innocently. "Are you worried you'll get in trouble? Did the Emperor - it is an Emperor, right - decree that none save him should touch me? Understandable thing for him to do but basically completely unachievable. I have the perk where he won't blame you because no one who sees me is capable of blaming you for fucking me."

This last sentence - she says it, but no one would be able to say quite what she said, except that it was a very convincing explanation for the fact that 'he won't blame you because no one who sees me is capable of blaming you for fucking me.' Her thoughts have precisely the same property. 

That's incredibly weird!!! Also, what??? 

This is an even weirder experience if, like Nayoki, one is standing outside of the room, not actually looking at the visitor at all or even hearing the words she's saying, and only interacting via reading her thoughts! 

Nayoki relays this latest update to Leareth, but includes the fact that something very odd is going on here and she's not...sure...if her Thoughtsensing is entirely accurate? 

The problem is not that he desperately wants to fuck her but is scared of getting in trouble! ....All right, he hadn't previously considered the question but he maybe does, sort of, want to. This still seems very beside the point. The actual problem is that something concerning was going on in Valdemar - he doesn't personally know all the details - and Leareth was worried enough to stage a conspicuous and costly intervention about it. And he's not less concerned now! 

This is fascinating. ...It's not not concerning but it's a far more interesting kind of concerning than Leareth had expected. Though, again, it's not like he has any clear sense of what he had been expecting, just - not this. 

:She seems to - think that she is here on some kind of mission?: he sends to Nayoki and the staff in the room. He's not entirely sure where or how he's getting that sense but he thinks it's true. :Can you please ask her why she thinks there is an Emperor involved and why she thinks he might have made decrees about people touching her? And also - I am not sure if this will get a useful answer, but - ask her why she thinks that being brought here is a step toward accomplishing her goals. Because it does seem to me that she thinks this, and I do not at all understand why: 

"- I'm not worried about getting in trouble? I - do want to know why you think I might be worried about that. And why you think there must be an Emperor involved here. Also you - seem to not be upset about us kidnapping you and all, and I don't know what you're expecting to happen here but it would make things way easier for us if you could explain." 

....That was super not what Leareth had asked him to say but, to be fair, Leareth had said multiple sentences in a row and he can't actually think very complicated thoughts while incredibly distracted because the hottest person in the entire world is touching his cheek and talking about fucking him.

It's got to be the Emperor of the Eastern Empire because otherwise the villain wasn't foreshadowed at all before he kidnapped her which would be terrible plot development. She does in fact know for sure that being brought here was a step forwards accomplishing her goals because she got 'welcome to the neighborhood II' from it, which probably comes with some more ability to use her magic powers not that she's checked, reading her notes in the middle of an interrogation scene is the kind of thing where something ridiculously inconvenient will happen and you will totally deserve it. 

She doesn't say any of that. She says instead, "Upset about you kidnapping me? Why would I be upset about that? Such handsome kidnappers, it'd be positively unsporting to get upset. Unless you're into that, in which case, I will warn you, you're going to have to try very hard, because upsetting me isn't easy."

"I don't -" why is this hot he hates his entire brain right now. 

Nayoki is so confused but it's not her job to understand this. She calmly relays to Leareth. 

What. 

...On reflection Leareth should probably swap out the Fetcher currently doing the talking here. This should have been fine under any normal circumstances but these are, clearly, not even slightly normal circumstances. 

:Nayoki: he sends. :Can you please attempt to place the standard prisoners' compulsion on her, not to harm anyone or sabotage any infrastructure? And then watch very closely and inform me whether it seems to work: 

Nayoki can do that although she is SURPRISINGLY DISTRACTED by thinking about how their prisoner is hot? Which makes no sense because she hasn't even seen her. 

She tries the default compulsion - it's a little harder through shields but not intractably so - and then watches very closely, especially with her Mindhealing Sight. 

It lands lightly on the surface of the prisoner's mind and - dissolves like there's nothing there to catch hold of.

She doesn't seem to notice. That's Magic Immunity III and she only has Magic Immunity II.

"You were told to take someone prisoner. And then you - weren't told not to touch her? In that case I will confess myself outright offended by your restraint," she is saying to the Talking Guy. 

Aaaaaaaaawhat? 

:It did not work: Nayoki informs Leareth, trying to keep her mindvoice much calmer than she actually feels. :It failed to work in a very odd way: 

Leareth really feels that he's going to resolve this baffling mystery much more quickly if he has the conversation himself, but Nayoki's report is really not making him feel any more comfortable about entering that room! 

(...Why does she think he's the Emperor of the Eastern Empire, that's such a bizarre specific assumption and - especially weird given how specific it is - it's surprisingly not-totally-wrong?) 

Nayoki sighs. :Do you want me to go in there? I might be able to make more headway: this is definitely not motivated reasoning on her part not at all

:...Maybe. I am considering it: And he reaches for the Fetcher's mind again. :Ask her if she intends harm to anyone here: 

This is, on top of everything else, the most sheerly awkward social interaction of his entire life!

At least being given another question to ask is an excuse to (awkwardly!!!) ignore everything else that she just said. "I, umm, do you - intend to harm anyone here?" 

"It's okay, it'll all be safe, insane, and consensual. And no under-18s, if I ever do go home I don't want to be awkwardly editing my memoirs."

Whyyyyyy does it feel like every time he asks a question, she answers a completely different question that is also much sexier not the point. It's very disorienting, is the point. 

Nayoki has to admit that this is not exactly reassuring, but it still seems like useful information? In some sense?

She relays it to Leareth. :I think I will not be in danger if I go in and talk to her. ...Honestly, I think you would not be either, but I would prefer to resolve the question of why she thinks you must be the Emperor of the Eastern Empire and also have forbidden all of your staff from touching her before you speak with her in person: 

(Nayoki is rather protective of Leareth.) 

This is...probably worth it? Leareth arranged all of this in order to figure out what was happening in Valdemar and he is really not any closer to answering that question. And, in fact, has several dozen additional questions. 

:All right. I...think it makes sense to be fairly open with her? I think it will be difficult to resolve all of the confusion here otherwise: 

:Right:

And Nayoki heads for the Work Room door, and forges in. 

:All of you are dismissed: she tells Leareth's staff, including the Fetcher. :I will take over from here: 

She waits and watches for the young woman's reaction to this. 

....Aaaaaaaaaaah what a relief but also at the same time he's weirdly upset about it??? 

"Sorry," the Fetcher says to their visitor/prisoner, and flees.

She turns a stunningly pretty pout on Nayoki. "It is mean to let me tease someone and not let him actually have me. Cruel and unreasonable work conditions. I'm gonna unionize this place."

"Let him...have you? ...I think you must have very different expectations around standard operational protocols than the ones I am used to! What does 'unionize' mean?" 

"Oh, Jesus, am I actually gonna have to do that now. You know, I feel like this is kind of being punished for being quippy. Uh, unionizing is when all of the workers get together to demand better working conditions, because the boss has more leverage than any one worker, but if they're all acting collectively then it's an equal playing field. So in this case, your workers are gonna want to demand the right to have sex with me, and, I dunno, health insurance? Dental? - actually I should clarify first, are we, like, dealing with the direct staff of the Emperor or is this a mercenary outfit he sent to grab me or what -"

"What an interesting concept!" Leareth will be so curious about it. "I should probably not ask more about it right now since we do have other priorities. ....First off, Leareth - the person I work for, who ordered your kidnapping in hopes of figuring out what was even happening in Haven - is not the Emperor of the Eastern Empire, and I am not sure why you had the impression that he would be? ...He was involved in setting up the Eastern Empire but that was a very long time ago." 

" - because no one else has been foreshadowed at all?" This is also, precisely, what she's thinking. "I guess 'set up the Eastern Empire' technically sort of works but it's such a stretch. I'm used to the villain having been established before he kidnaps me!"

The entire way that this woman reasons is baffling. 

"You are....used to that? Has this - happened to you before?" 

Six times now!

"Hey. uh, at this point I think we're getting into interrogation territory and I don't just give up information because people ask nicely. It's a matter of pride. If you don't have an army I bet you can still wrangle something but it'll take some creativity."

Not getting any less confusing! The fact that it's also weirdly hot is beside the point.

"I mean, Leareth does have an army but he does not generally use it for interrogations. I am not even sure how one would go about using an entire army for that?"

Also Leareth wouldn't need to because Thoughtsensing and compulsions exist. Though the latter apparently don't work on this woman. Presumably she knows that Thoughtsensing exists, if she's been in Valdemar for a while? Nayoki isn't going to be the first one to bring it up. 

...Is her Mindhealing Sight giving her anything at all useful, here? 

" - gangbang," she says instantly. "I really thought that was pretty unambiguous innuendo. Does Leareth have a title? Dark Lord? Evil Emperor? Tyrant of Terrara?"

The woman's mind is - not nearly as far outside the normal range as you'd expect for the bizarre thing she's saying. 

She is a very fetching loaf of bread. It's somehow sensually appealing. You can almost smell it, and it smells nice. 

Nayoki's Mindhealing Sight does not normally include anything even vaguely analogous to smell! Let alone sensually nice smells! This is surprisingly distracting and it's not a route where she was expecting that kind of distraction!

 "Leareth does not really have a title? He is not actually the leader of a country, yet." And then, because she can't help herself, apparently, "- some people in the north do refer to him as Master Dark. I assume because 'Leareth' means 'darkness' in the Tayledras language. Though in the original Kaled'a'in tongue that he knew, and chose it from, it means the night sky full of stars." 

"Master Dark! Yeah, now we're hopping. An army, but no country - so, by any chance, was he planning to use the army to invade the country?" She will have to thwart him. With sex. She does not expect this to be hard; there are usually a couple plot twists but no more mortal peril than in your average Pixar movie. She's not that kinky.

"...I suppose that is the natural extrapolation here. And Leareth has told me to be open with you, in hopes that - this will result in him learning the answers to his many, many questions sooner, I think. So - yes, that was the original intended purpose for his army." 

Pause. 

"- I confess I am a little surprised that Vanyel did not tell you about it? Given that you were, by all accounts, close with him." 

"He just kinda stared off into the middle distance. I figured the Evil Emperor had killed his whole family and he just wasn't ready to talk about it yet, but then apparently they're all alive -

- shit fuck I'm a moron - 

- Master Dark killed Tylendel. Right?"

"....Not personally? At least I am fairly sure he would have told me if that were the case! I - would have to check if he knows more about the circumstances than I do..." 

"Well, you should check that!! Because it's so blindingly obvious I was obviously supposed to figure it out a week ago!! Vanyel lost something emotionally equivalent to 'his whole family' to the supervillain! Vanyel's too emotionally damaged to talk about it! Vanyel has a fucking hole in his soul from the death of his partner, Tylendel, in an incident he doesn't want to talk about! And I'd already found Stef so I was like 'neat, that plotline's getting all resolved, weird how I have no leads on the supervillain' -

- did you know that there's no stat to make myself smarter, I can get hotter or hornier or kinkier or less constrained by the laws of physics but I am as much of a dumbass as I was on Day 1. I take back my imputations about the writers, this one's on me."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah - 

:Leareth can you tell me about the circumstances of Tylendel's death? I think he was Herald Vanyel's first partner. I - just - she is asking about that: 

Nayoki is perhaps going to LEAVE UNSPECIFIED the exact question being asked. Because it's awful. 

(Also she feels like there was a lot of information in their most recent exchange and she should really be trying to mentally note that down and convey it to Leareth but she is too busy internally screaming.) 

...Where did that come from. Leareth was not expecting this to come up in their conversation! 

:I did not intend his death specifically, but - the bloodpath mage involved in the feud with his family and the neighboring landholding was one whom I had supplied, and - given the assignment of kidnapping young mage-gifted children or killing Herald-Mages for bounty. I think there was - extensive scheming by several gods involved, as well, but I did play a causal role in Tylendel's death:

Pause. 

:I confess I am very curious why she is asking about that?: 

Nayoki is not going to have any feelings about that right now. Which mostly requires not having any thoughts either. 

"Leareth says he did not intend Tylendel's death but one of his existing plots was - involved in causing it. Though also the gods were involved. I am not sure if you have encountered Them much, yet, but They are very terrible and inconvenient." 

'did not intend Tylendel's death' seems like it might be weaselly bullshit, but if it is Master Dark'll tearfully confess as much later, she's in no hurry. 

"Uh, I don't think this is exactly the kind of story where religion features," she says reassuringly, about the gods.

"And I know people around here think that homosexuality is objectionable but actually -" slight smile - "don't knock it till you've tried it, is how I see these things."

What????? ....Are those two statements supposed to be related. Nayoki can't tell but if they are then that's even more confusing. Also why is their visitor trying to convince her not to object to Vanyel's sexual preferences, Nayoki doesn't care which sex Vanyel's former lifebonded partner was, that is so incredibly not the point here. 

"I - have no idea what 'story' you think you are in right now," she says faintly, "but - I am fairly sure that if you continue to go around doing the kinds of things you have been doing so far - I am not even sure what you were doing in Haven, since you seem to be unwilling to just tell us, but it is enough to know that it caught Leareth's attention - if you keep doing that, the gods are going to notice you and take action against you, and whatever you think about it will not matter." 

"Ooooooh." She wiggles delightedly. "The Greek kind of gods."

"The what kind of gods?"

Are this woman's thoughts any more informative than the teasingly intriguing but not-actually-informative words she just said? 

She was thinking gods like some bullshit that's probably made up and really sex-negative, and now she's thinking gods like men with superpowers who live on mountains and come down as animals to rape all the villagers. "Uh, I mean, like, not omnipotent and all-loving, kind of specific. And will have sex with you. Which is what's most relevant for my purposes."

What is she even supposed to say to that.

...Nayoki takes a breath and relays the thoughts she just picked up directly to Leareth, for lack of any better response and in hopes that either he'll have a suggestion for what to say or at least it'll buy her time to think of something. 

:....I am deeply confused about her ontology for - how gods work - but I am not sure that is the most critical part? I want to understand why she seems to be running all of her reasoning and anticipations on the premise that she is - living in a story? That is about sex?: 

This is inconveniently not a line she can repeat back verbatim as a response. 

"I...would certainly not describe our gods as either omnipotent or all-loving? But they are also...not even slightly the kind of entity that you could have sex with and I am not sure why anyone would want to. - Why is that so relevant for your purposes?"

"So you just said, 'if you keep doing that, the gods are going to notice you and take action against you, and whatever you think about it will not matter.' Which definitely means a god is going to rape me at some point. So I kinda figured they made a habit of it but if not, maybe they make an exception for me, whatever."

That is such a strange assumption for her to be landing on! 

"Gods do not have physical forms, I am not sure how They could– ...I suppose They could possess one of Their followers to rape you, for some reason? Usually what They do to Leareth is - indirectly arranging assassination plots, or causing bridges to coincidentally collapse while he is crossing them. Vkandis did set him on fire a couple of times but that was unusually unsubtle." 

Well, they're not going to do that to her, she's not into that. 

"Okay. I'll, uh, be on the lookout. Do you want to stop doing this interrogation and flee Master Dark's organization together?"

Does she want to what? This is not a normal conversation! ...Well, interrogating a mysterious stranger they kidnapped and took prisoner from Haven is in itself not something that would lead to normal conversations but even for the realm of prisoner-interrogation this is incredibly weird! 

...Leareth advised her to be open and honest, in hopes of learning as much as possible, and Nayoki is going to construe that as including some amount of emotional vulnerability, because the response to that is going to be informative, surely. Also very personally interesting. 

"Not especially, no. I like working for Leareth. The homeland I escaped from was much, much worse than this, and - Leareth was the first person to offer me resources, and space to explore and learn and discover, and to - believe that I could do something valuable, given that investment. To believe I was someone worth investing in. ...I suspect he would feel the same about you, since you seem to have - some kind of power, and one that I do not recognize at all. He will very badly want to understand - this, you - and I think would be highly motivated to offer you whatever working conditions you need." 

"Well, worth a shot." It seemed possible this kidnapping was just to get her back on track with respect to figuring out who the villain is and wasn't actually meant to be her encounter with the villain. "If you change your mind, you know where to find me. We can fast-travel to Urtho's Tower, betcha Master Dark can't get to us there."

:....She has access to Urtho's Tower?: 

What. How?

- Actually from some angle that fits, it clicks into place and...explains some things. How Vanyel could productively spend an entire year on his Leareth-fact-finding mission, for one, and why there was no sign of him to spies for six months. And this stranger - who he's increasingly doubting is even human - must have encountered him there? 

:Ask her how she knows about Urtho's Tower. And - hmm, if she has been there I am somewhat surprised she does not know more about me. That...would presumably have been the entire point of Vanyel's trip: 

It is weirdly hot to have this person offer to run away with her to Urtho's Tower, even though Nayoki in fact has no interest in fleeing the best position she's been in in her entire life. Also why does she keep thinking that? Nayoki is...not normally this distracted about attractive people in her vicinity. She's not normally distracted at all by it, really. 

"I am curious about the circumstances by which you found Urtho's Tower," she says lightly. "While Vanyel was there, presumably? Also whether you - knew the purpose of Vanyel's travel there, and how it was related to Leareth." 

"Ugh, did I miss a plot hook there, too? Anyway, that sure does sound like an interrogation question." Her tone is lightly scolding.

(Vanyel, lost in a haze of pain and delirium on the ground, actually required days of gentle tending before he was conscious enough the erogamer could explain that he could copy Van's magic powers by sleeping with him - he did, obviously, consider fucking Van while he was out of it in order to get the magic, what with how it looked like Van was dying in agony, but if you let the erogame give you moral dilemmas like that it'll never stop and also it would not have been hot. At all. Anyway, once he had Van's gifts it was just a matter of getting the tutorial in the local magic system while petting Vanyel's hair and nursing him back to health and breaking down his emotional walls and getting the story about Tylendel and sincerely swearing that that's exactly the kind of thing his magic won't permit to abide in the world.)

(She's male, in these memories, and doesn't seem to find that notable at all.)

That...answers some questions. Kind of? Ish? It also raises so many more questions. 

Also, awwwwwwwwwwww her thoughts about Vanyel are sweet. 

Since Nayoki doesn't know what to make of it at all, she relays all of this to Leareth. 

Leareth's mind is spinning as he tries to fit these pieces together.

The person is...from another world? And has some kind of very powerful native magic, which includes the ability to copy Gifts, but is...based on sex? Which fits with all of her - his? - all of their bizarre interactions with Leareth's staff. He won't go as far as to say that it makes sense of them because nothing about this makes sense. 

He made a sincere promise to Vanyel that events like Tylendel's death were 'exactly the kind of thing his magic won't permit to abide in the world'. What does that mean? Can his kind of magic end death? 

If so, this is the most important thing that has ever happened. 

Leareth is not prompting her with anything to say, presumably because he's just as distracted chasing down implications as she is. The silence is starting to feel awkwardly long. 

- and then another of the implications falls into place. "Ohhhhh, is that why you were spending so much time with Melody in Haven? Did you manage to sleep with her?"

If this stranger has Mindhealing Gift then– Nayoki isn't sure what, actually. It's clear that one way or another, she's incredibly powerful, and presumably could leave at any moment she chose. And is...choosing not to. Because she's following some kind of plot? Which involves Leareth. 

"No!" Pout. "I actually - this is embarrassing to admit, but - I haven't gotten laid in two days and it's kind of killing me. I'm hornier than a normal person, you know."

"I had noticed that, yes," Nayoki says dryly. 

Pause. 

"- I also have Mindhealing Gift, you know." Wait why did she just say that out loud. 

"Ooooh." Head-tilt. "I hardly needed any more persuading. ....I could maybe compromise on the army requirement, you know, probably one Mindhealer is sufficient to wring all my secrets out of me."

"We are rather good at that, yes. And I have some relevant special training. Leareth uses Mindhealers for rather different purposes than the House of Healing in Haven does." Nayoki winks at the absurdly attractive woman/delicious bread and then wonders why in all hells she did that.

:...Leareth please tell me if this is a terrible idea and I should stop: she sends, and then finds herself hoping very very hard that Leareth does not think it's a terrible idea.

And she has no idea where that feeling is coming from either. :- I think she has some kind of mind-affecting magic: she adds. 

Leareth is also incredibly confused!!! 

:It does seem valuable to learn more of why she is here and what her aims are: he concedes. :And she does seem - very unwilling to engage with anything unless it is about sex. - It would be interesting to confirm if she does, in fact, copy Gifts off of people she sleeps with. And if she already has Vanyel's Gifts, then the marginal addition of Mindhealing is - not going to be game-changing, in terms of how easily she can threaten our operations. I think: 

Leareth is not entirely sure that the mysterious mind-affecting magic isn't also affecting him, but - more than anything else he wants to understand what's going on. And it seems almost impossible to make progress on that without, well, going along with the 'plot' their alien visitor seems to have in mind. 

:...If you are sure:

Nayoki has no idea how to run an interrogation that is also a sex scene! Why is this what's happening now??? She...is going to smile at the woman and then sort of stand there and wait to see what she says. 

She does not have very long to worry about this before the girl springs on her with genuine delight. "Rarely have I been at the mercy of such a beautiful woman," she whispers. "Your Master Dark is very lucky. You will have to teach me all about creative Mindhealing. I insist. I am in no position to insist but I insist anyway."

And she holds Nayoki's head still and kisses her firmly.

Nayoki kind of feels like, actually, she is the one at the mercy of an absurdly beautiful woman!

She is, however, not complaining. 

The very convenient thing about Mindspeech is that kissing does not need to conflict with talking. 

:So: she says eventually. :How exactly did you end up nursing Vanyel back to health in Urtho's Tower? I am sure there is a fascinating story there: 

(Leareth, for reasons of generalized paranoia, has stationed one of his strongest Thoughtsensers near the room, to directly observe Nayoki and the alien sex-magic-equipped stranger, and then relocated himself to an entirely different facility, where he can receive realtime reports via long-range Mindspeech.) 

Real-time report: the alien with powerful sex magic feels that actually people she's having sex with should be much too distracted to ask any questions, and will escalate the distractions until that's been achieved. 

She puts most of her points into FUK. She doesn't actually like what ERO does to the world around her, so as soon as it was high enough to travel to other universes she stopped increasing it, and she's actually never met anyone it was particularly impossible to seduce at BOD 25 and SED 25. FUK, on the other hand, you can just keep getting better at. 

They can talk about Urtho's Tower once they're done.

"I'm collecting a harem of supervillains," she tells Nayoki drowsily, about an hour later. "I got a [perfectly reasonable reason to do it] and I've got six so far. One of 'em had heard of Velgarth and thought I'd be into it, so she did a portal for me. - her world has better fast-travel than yours. Dropped me in the tutorial zone where I met Vanyel."

You would think it would be difficult to have a glorious sexual experience while in a stone-walled Work Room with no actual...furniture...but the alien with powerful sex magic seems to be able to obviate the need for silly things like 'beds'. 

This is quickly becoming the best day that Nayoki has ever had in her entire life, and while on the one hand she has to assume that mind-control is involved somehow, on the other hand she does not, actually, care. It's not as though she's ever particularly had qualms about using Mindhealing to have a good time. (She just mostly never got around to it? Which is, in hindsight, a weird oversight on her part. She should fix that.) 

"I see," she murmurs back, nuzzling the stranger's neck. "Another world? That is fascinating! What...exactly is a 'supervillain'?" 

“It’s like porn, you know it when you see it. Name like Master Dark. Armies, plans of world conquest, kidnapping innocent girls, killed a boy and left Vanyel with a hole in his soul…. Urtho was also a supervillain.”

Leareth is not receiving a direct relay of the Thoughtsenser's reads; he asked to instead get a summarized verbal report, sent by a second Mindspeaker also stationed nearby. He's aware that they're playing with fire, here - that there is some kind of mysterious yet incredibly powerful force involved, that they don't even slightly understand, and it's very very clear that it's warping all of Nayoki's thoughts and motivations, and Nayoki seems half-unaware of this - 

- and he has to assume it's affecting him as well, but - what else is he going to do? He can't just walk away from this fascinating anomaly, and - if any of his guesses are on the right track, this is unquestionably the most important thing that's happened in at least the last thousand years. Maybe in his entire life. 

She comes from another world, which includes at least one mention of magic more powerful than anything Velgarth has to offer. She's - collecting a harem?? of "supervillains"?

(She found Vanyel and immediately tried to fix all of his problems - told him that those kinds of problems were unacceptable, that she and her magic couldn't abide that kind of horror existing in the world - and leaving all the rest aside, Leareth is deeply grateful for that...) 

She personally has powerful magic that seems...for some reason...to mostly be about sex? 

Even apart from that, she - seems to be running all of her reasoning on the basis that– on a premise that is sort of like believing she lives in a ballad? This feels important. Like it's the key to making sense of any of this. 

Leareth is not, yet, making sense of any of this, and then he receives the Mindspeech summary of her commentary about Urtho and he is suddenly very distracted. 

"From everything I have heard of Urtho - which is not very much - I cannot disagree!" 

Nayoki thinks, distantly, that she should probably have some actual coherent questions, but mostly she...doesn't. Mostly she is very happy and relaxed and wants to ride that wave as long as she can. 

"...So. Mindhealing. You wanted a tutorial?" 

“Yes!” Delightedly. “I’m pretty sure there is an entire skill tree here and I bet it synergizes great with Mindbending Sex.”

"There must be! I confess I have not explored this area nearly as much as I ought to. I suppose you might put in redirects from - whatever you wanted - toward sexual arousal. I have not done that before but I think I could figure it out with some practice -" 

....What is "Mindbending Sex" and why isn't Nayoki asking the obvious questions? It turns out that it's actually very frustrating to be fifty miles away from the most interesting mystery he's ever encountered, with only the narrow channel of Mindspeech communication. Leareth isn't going to do anything differently, yet, he's not stupid, but he is frustrated. 

:Please relay to Nayoki to ask how she obtained her - broader magical abilities: Leareth sends to his point of contact. :And whether it is possible for other people to learn: 

This is so annoying! Nayoki was busy having the best sexual encounter of her entire life and now Leareth wants her to resume the interrogation part? 

Sigh. "- In a moment. Leareth wanted to know how you - er -" it's weirdly difficult to remember what she was supposed to be asking about, "- how you obtained your sex powers? And whether it is replicable for other people?" 

“Master Dark can fuck me himself if he wants to ask me lots of boring questions. Is the Mindhealing Gift the reason you look like a bunch of silk ribbons in a really complicated tie - do I need to level bondage to use Mindhealing-“

"I think Leareth does not...fuck...people? I am not sure he has even had any romantic relationships in the last thousand years. ...Tragically. I think he is missing out on something important and it is impossible to convince him to care, he - is so focused on, on fixing all of the problems in the world - I am not sure how to convince him that it would be good for him to also do things that make him happy...." 

(Nayoki thinks, distantly, that she's also not sure why she said all of that out loud, she hadn't even known until now that it was how she felt. Though it undeniably is how she feels. Leareth is so alone and it's a tragedy, whether or not he would ever notice this let alone admit it to himself or anyone else.) 

...Oh, right, she was being asked a question. "Silk ribbons! That must be your Sight metaphor. How fascinating. Mine is..." And she parts her shields and tries to slip into full concert-rapport, to show her own bread-Sight of the stranger's mind. 

"Oh, incidentally, I am not sure I ever got your name? My name is Nayoki. If I did not already say that." 

Previously:

”Ah, shoot, names,” he says when Vanyel, inevitably, asks. “I usually pick one per world. Does your language have any names that could be a girl, could be a boy -“

"You usually pick one per -" Nevermind, he is not going to ask any more questions about that, it generally doesn't go anywhere useful.

(And he's also not going to press on the whole "could be a girl, could be a boy" bit, mostly because that will predictably be the most awkward conversation imaginable, and also won't go anywhere useful.) 

"Let me think. Ummm. I think Callan could be either? The Herald Callan I know of from the ballads was a man but it could be a woman's name. Or, wait, maybe it was Fallan - no, that was a different person. Arvil is a name that could be a boy or girl, I haven't met any Arvils myself but I wouldn't be able to guess their sex just from the name, if I did. Or Elfyn, I actually think I've met a boy with that name in some village, and then a girl with the same name in a village on the other side of Valdemar..." 

Other suggested names include:

- Laylan 

- Isten

- Jebren 

“Elfyn might work. It needs to be - a bit of a stripper name, if you take my meaning? And this seems like a good universe to lean into Tolkien - I want an alliterative surname - Elfyn Everyoung, how about that. Do people even have surnames here.”

Vanyel does not at all know what she means by 'stripper name', and has even less idea what 'Tolkien' means, but it's fine. 

"What, as in your family name? Yes, usually, though the noble families, er, take it more seriously. And Heralds tend not to use their family names at all. My family name is Ashkevron but nobody calls me that anymore."

(Instead they call him Demonsbane, and Firelord, and Hero of Stony Tor... And he is not going to dwell on Tylendel's clever wordplay when he chose 'ashke' as a pet name for him...)

"Everyoung - doesn't exactly sound like a usual family name, either for nobles or commoners, but I...guess it's evocative, at least?" 

He bows. “Elfyn Everyoung. At your service.” Which he says like he deeply means it.

It's - sweet, and strange, and kind of overwhelming, and so so so confusing. And Vanyel isn't sure that he cares. It's not as though his life before this made sense, either - it feels like the world stopped making sense seventeen years ago, when the horizon turned to fire on the other side of a faltering Gate.

And at least this is a flavor of not-making sense that also happens to be pleasant and fun. 

In the present: 

Nayoki is still waiting for an answer. Though not with any particular impatience. She's in such a good mood right now. 

The Thoughtsenser observing from outside the room is so incredibly curious how the sex magic alien is going to respond to Nayoki's unexpectedly emotional speech about Leareth's loneliness. 

"What, you kidnap a girl and don't even bother to learn her name first? I knew yours, it was on my [magic source of information]. Elfyn Everyoung.

....'he hasn't had a woman for a thousand years and is too distant for any human connections' sounds like an incredibly paint-by-numbers solve-before-the-first-commercial-break kinda problem, except I've been promised a hell of a reward for this quest so I actually bet it's going to be more complicated than that somehow."

The Thoughtsenser outside starts to summarize this for passing along to Leareth, and then stops, and frowns at the wall. She knew Nayoki's name because it was on her what? 

He shrugs, and relays to the other Mindspeaker nearby that she knew Nayoki's name for - some reason that makes perfect sense but that he didn't quite follow? And then sends the of her words verbatim, because how do you even summarize that. 

......Leareth has never before been accused of - being a quest to complete??? Let alone a "paint-by-numbers" quest or a "solve-before-the-first-commercial-break" one, whatever those even mean; the Thoughtsenser relaying thinks, based on Elfyn's thoughts, that they're probably...synonyms for 'boring' or 'trivial' or 'not challenging enough to matter'. Which is a very jarring thing for someone to think about Leareth as a person. He has no idea what to do with it. 

Nayoki giggles. "Is that just your whole thing - you go around on quests to fuck people and collect a harem of supervillains and you get rewards for - succeeding at that? What sort of reward are you expecting for this one? ...Come to think of it, who's the one rewarding you, anyway? Do you work for your own version of a Master Dark?" 

"Can't tell you that." Literally; when she says something about the [non-mysterious and uninteresting origin of powers] they'll just hear that the answer is boring and irrelevant. "Uh, my reward for this quest is never having a moral dilemma again, reportedly, so that's got to be some hot shit and I'm expecting it's going to take a really good arc to get there."

The Thoughtsenser bravely tries his best to relay whatever she was just thinking about why she can’t tell Nayoki how her magic sex powers work. His best attempt is not especially coherent.

That makes the least sense of anything so far! Which is saying quite a lot! Leareth desperately wants to understand Elfyn’s alien magic, so - how can the problem possibly be that any attempt to describe it ends up conveying nothing except that it’s boring and doesn’t matter? It does matter! This is so baffling and frustrating! 

Nayoki giggles again. It’s a tense, high-pitched giggle; the subject is not actually very funny.

”Huh! That is very odd. I…would not have imagined that knowing Leareth would result in encountering fewer moral dilemmas! What sorts of moral dilemmas have you tended to run into before, anyway?”

" - don't actually wanna talk about this. I'm - not gonna fuck up your world, if that's what you're worried about? I don't do that. I give some people a nice time and seduce some supervillains to mend their evil ways and then I skip town." And it's great, most of the time, except when this specific unpleasant subject comes up!

“….I have to say, I cannot imagine how you could possibly convince Leareth to - make any different choices - just by having sex with him. That is not really how he works. Though if you somehow do it anyway, that will be such a good story.”

Sigh. Nayoki is at all capable of reading a room and she can tell that Elfyn really genuinely does not want to talk about this. 

"Anyway, I am sure he will want to speak to you himself as soon as he has gotten over being intensely paranoid that you might try to murder him. In the meantime, we could play with Mindhealing some more?"

There's an argument that she absolutely should not be teaching the mysterious sex alien how to use Mindhealing creatively, in case she goes off and uses it on Leareth, but on the other hand if she used Mindhealing to seduce Leareth that would be incredibly hot   Nayoki is, on some level, concerned that she's making bad decisions right now due to sex mind control, but it's a very distant level and the concern is not loud enough to actually cause her to stop. 

"Yes, we should! And when we're done with that you can use magic to tie me up for Master Dark, if that'll make him feel better."

"You have literally all of the Gifts! In addition to whatever powers you already had from your previous quests and your mysterious sex magic! I am not sure that tying you up would make you much less dangerous as an adversary at all. If Leareth decides he is willing to be in the same room as you, it will be because he is sufficiently convinced you are not directly hostile. ...Though I suppose it might be fun to tie you up anyway, and maybe it would help a little..." 

Leareth is really not sure it would help! The thing that would actually help is having her under a dozen of the usual compulsions, but compulsions apparently don't work on her. 

Maybe Nayoki can eventually work around to doing some Mindhealing on her to replicate the effect? If she...frames that as a sex thing? 

Sure. Nayoki - after she's had various other kinds of fun - can work her way around to proposing this. 

She will actually get to that idea herself! "There has got to be something I can do to these mind-ribbons that's the equivalent of tying up, but for magic, so the person can't use it."

"There are many things in that genre that you can do! Blocking only the ability to use magic, without any side effects, is very difficult - though, actually, we think Valdemar must have invented a method, since Vanyel was able to block his Foresight for the past year and thus avoid having the dream where he speaks to Leareth -" 

Oh, right, Elfyn possibly doesn't...know...about that? It didn't seem like Vanyel had told her anything about his strange, tense, decades-long destined enemy/quasi-friendship with Leareth.

Nayoki...will wait and see if she asks any questions about it. 

Yes, yes, it's already been driven home that she missed several plot hooks there. "Well, if you block some other things I won't complain. Unless they're sex things, then I'll complain loudly."

Nayoki's Sight-metaphor is not actually very convenient for this! She's great at rapidly incapacitating people in fully reversible ways; she's much less good at the fiddly detailed stuff. Elfyn's ribbons metaphor is probably way better and Nayoki is jealous! Maybe they can do some concert-rapport Sight sharing and Nayoki can experiment with things that way, and try to figure out a magic block that doesn't have all sorts of weird sensory side effects like the ones she's done in the past. 

“Do non-Mindhealers just not have any way of stopping people from using magic? That seems really inconvenient! Melody is, like, the only sexually mature Mindhealer in all of Haven.”

"I mean, if you are a mage you can put compulsions on people! I think the Heralds do not use this because it goes against their ethical principles." Slight eyeroll. "The downside is that compulsions are - very narrow, usually? And...brittle, compared to Mindhealing. If you want to use them to reliably and definitely block someone's ability to use magic, without any loopholes they could exploit, then it will have all sorts of side effects on their ability to think or - walk around in a room - things like that." 

The ribbon metaphor makes it a lot easier to zero in on specific Gifts! 

“Or have sex? I don’t mind if I can’t think or can’t walk.”

"I...confess I have never had reason to test that! Although I think you might just be immune to compulsions because of your sex magic? We tried it when we had first kidnapped you and it did not work." 

“Well obviously your magic won’t work on me if you haven’t fucked me! That’s the first level of the whole magic immunity skill tree, people have to fuck me to have power over me. Otherwise it’d be a lot more trouble getting supervillains to convince themselves they’re making good decisions.”

...Possibly Nayoki should have more concerns than she does about the fact that she is maybe being led into making terrible decisions while Elfyn's sex magic convinces her that they are actually good decisions??? 

Well, she's going to continue to leave the good-decision-making up to Leareth. She is just here to have a great time, right now. 

"Oh, how clever. I am going to place all the standard ones for prisoners, then. I do not think any of them should interfere with sex at all. Leareth will probably want some additional precautions because he hates mysterious forces beyond his understanding, but we can start with this." 

She starts trying to lay some compulsions. Does it work, this time? 

(Leareth takes reports on this from a distance, and tries to think through how many precautions have to be in place before this becomes 'not an incredibly stupid idea.' It's not going to be safe, either way, but he's willing to take on some risk, for the level of upside he might expect here.) 

It does work this time!!

Elfyn notices it, this time, and moans and shudders at it.

Nayoki would not previously have expected that this would be such a turn-on! She considers, briefly, whether to feel bad about that fact, before deciding this would be stupid. 

And so, while messages are relayed back and forth between her and Leareth, via the two Mindspeakers in the middle, Nayoki can incidentally have a delightful time while making very very sure that Elfyn will definitely not be able to harm Leareth. Or do very much period. Most of why this is fiddly and exact is because she does need to leave Elfyn able to talk. 

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?"

...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." 

"You know, that would be fair, except for how my entire magic system runs on human connection and romance and sex."

Huh. That was a clear explicit answer to a question about her magic system. Nayoki had been under the impression that that somehow wasn't allowed? 

That's such a strange base for a style of magic to be built on! Then again, maybe Leareth should be trying harder to set aside all of his assumptions about what is or isn't weird. Maybe Velgarth's Gifts - or its gods - seem just as bizarre to her as what she said seems to him. 

(Also, in addition to being admirable and worthy of respect, Elfyn is impressive and eloquent and just pulled an entire long detailed thoughtful explanation out of apparently nowhere, and maybe some of this impression is actually just mind-control but it can't all be that...) 

"I - right - so if I want to learn your kind of magic, or - ally with you and have you use your magic to help fix everything wrong with Velgarth - then I need to, to do the romance and sex part first? Is that the implication here?" 

"You can use me however you'd like. I'm not your enemy. But if you're thinking first I fix things and then you fall in love with me, well unfortunately -" let's see if I can roll SED to talk about my problem with doing-stuff - 

"I don't fix everything wrong with the world. I know I should. I don't think the magic wouldn't stretch that way, if I really wanted it to, wouldn't give me opportunities to cure diseases with orgies and will pollution out of the sky because having half my OKCupid matches saying 'I'm not having kids because of the climate crisis' is unsexy. It was willing to transform my whole world. Some local politicians who'd been trying to ban trans kids getting treatment decided that actually everyone's got a little bit of boy and girl in them. The PrEP clinic was suddenly the classiest place in town and everyone agreed it also worked on all STDs now for some reason."

This is not what using SED feels like. The thing earlier about hugs was using SED. This is just - talking, and it sucks as much as it always does. 

Ugh. 

"I don't .....know what the world should be like. So I can't reshape it. What if I make it the wrong shape. What if actually everyone doesn't have a little bit of boy and girl in them but I do so I made them all that way because I think it's sexy. And forget the thing where I don't have perfect control over the [thing you can't yet understand], maybe that's solvable, say I could do exactly what I wanted, what the fuck is that??? If I yank all the extra carbon out of the atmosphere do I cause some kind of sudden backlash collapse thing? If I turn all the nukes into giant chocolate bars that say 'make love not war' on them does China invade Japan and Korea immediately? Or, like, there's the effective altruism people, good fucking luck, they'll be like 'have you considered wild animal suffering' and 'can you use your powers to shut down all AI research immediately, it's life-or-death for all of human civilization'. AND THERE's A MULTIVERSE AND NO ONE HAS FIGURED OUT WHETHER ANY OF ETHICS WORKS IF THERE ARE INFINITE WORLDS.

And like - there's a thing here I'm not saying, which is 'there's no way to know if anything is a good idea'. There is a way to know. It's just really fucking hard. It would involve hiring a huge number of people and figuring out which ones are actually good at their jobs and firing the ones who aren't and reading a bunch of zany ideas for how to make decisions and figuring out the non-stupid ones and implementing them and doing this three times with three organizations in different countries that don't know about each other and then doing whatever they agree on, or something.A bunch of the stuff I did would be bad and tons of people would hate me and I'd probably fuck up and destroy some worlds but hopefully not mine. It'd probably be better than not doing anything. Not just a little better. A lot better. 

I don't care that much. Not about - not about the fate of my whole world, and I love my world, I want it to be okay. And there are so goddamned many worlds, and there's no real reason to think it would ever get any easier. I am not willing to spend my eternity fixing them, I - I want to say I can't but I don't even think that's true, I think I can, and I just don't want to. 

I won't help you fix everything wrong with Velgarth. You'll have to do it yourself. All I do is fuck you until you don't want to be evil anymore, because I like that part."

Well. 

That's that said, then. 

The SED kicked in for various bits of that but weird bits, not the bits she would have identified in advance as sexy. 

Nayoki has so many new questions now! What is a "climate crisis", is that her world's equivalent of the returning Mage Storms echoes in their future? What is "PrEP". (Why did her mind sort of stumble and skip just then?) ...What is a chocolate bar. What are "nukes", based on her thoughts just then they're probably horrifying! Who are the "effective altruism people" and is there any way for Leareth to open communications with them from here because it sure sounds like they would get along. 

.....It feels oddly deeply unfair how much that hurts. 

It is hard. It's almost impossibly hard and even now, even after almost two millennia, Leareth doesn't know if he can do it. If he can be clever enough and careful enough and prepared enough to design plans that actually work and fix the problems in the world without causing other, worse problems. And she's not wrong, that even the ethics of judging what is and isn't a problem, and what does or doesn't count as 'fixed', is incredibly hard and maybe no human who's ever lived was smart enough or careful enough to figure that out. 

(And there are other worlds, and she's not wrong that of course there wouldn't just be two - he doesn't know about 'infinite' or what degree of infinity but there must be many - and that changes so much, and it means stepping back and re-evaluating everything he thought he knew, and he's suddenly so tired...) 

Leareth...cannot bring himself to think poorly of anyone who looks at all that, at the endless fractal complexity of the world, and decides that no, actually, they do care but not hard enough to try to fix it, not if that means working alone, not if it means having to reshape themselves over and over again into the person they need to be, to pull that off - 

- someday, Leareth hopes, once the work is– not done, he's not sure it will ever be done, but once the sharp awful edges of the world as it is now are padded, once there are safety rails, once there's a safe solid foundation for people to build the world they want to live in - someday, in that world, if he can make that happen, he hopes that the children born there would call the person Leareth is now a monster. Because in that world, someone like him shouldn't have to exist. 

...Leareth, separately, doesn't understand what she means by "fuck you until you don't want to be evil anymore", what is 'evil' there pointing at, how would that cash out in terms of changes to his current decision process? He - doesn't really expect asking her to get a good answer. 

He is, somehow, feeling more intensely lonely than he ever has before. And also - and you would think this would be actively in tension with the first feeling - he kind of really does want a hug? 

He doesn't say this out loud, mostly because twenty different thoughts are competing for space in working memory and he's not sure he can speak in coherent sentences just yet. 

(...Which seems suspiciously like it might be sex-mind-control related, actually? As does the 'wanting a hug' part? Though Leareth is still pretty sure that he doesn't want to fuck her, which makes it hard to judge.) 

She can tell Leareth wants a hug but she still cannot do much in the way of directed non-wiggling movement. Which is terrible!! One thing if it's a scene but Leareth...did not understand that he was doing a scene, here, she's increasingly getting the sense. And he needs a hug. 

"Master Dark," she says, and then, "Leareth. 

People aren't meant to do this alone."

This is somehow really adorable and also very upsetting to watch at the same time! Nayoki is so unsure what to do about it. Well. She could hug Leareth, in theory, but it feels like that...wouldn't actually accomplish the thing? 

Leareth can vaguely tell that she seems more distressed about her lack of mobility, and he had briefly been paying less attention to her surface thoughts but he leans again, and - oh - huh - he's confused about what exactly she thinks he didn't understand he was getting into? It seems to maybe be a sex-magic-related concept. 

"I...am not sure what you mean by that," he says, slowly, heavily. "If you just mean that it is - not generally psychologically tenable, let alone emotionally healthy, to - try to do the thing I am doing - then I cannot disagree. But it is not as though reality cares about that." 

Pause. 

"- Possibly some major force in your reality does? Unfortunately I am still not quite following where your powers come from and why they - depend on romance and human connection." 

He sighs. :Nayoki, you can probably undo some of the compulsions - the ones restricting physical movement, at least. I am very confident she is not going to try to harm me: 

On the one hand, it's really hard to tell if this is a sensible reasoned Leareth-decision or one resulting from mind-affecting-sex-magic nudges? On the other hand, if she has to keep sitting here watching Leareth not get hugs for one more minute, she might explode. 

Nayoki undoes the most restrictive of the compulsions, leaving only the standard ones for (not unusually absurdly dangerous) prisoners, plus the basic ones to block Gift-use; Elfyn should still be thoroughly blocked from making or carrying out plans to escape, or harm Leareth or any of his staff, or sabotage any of his infrastructure or projects. She might, if she tried hard and was determined and creative about it, be able to work around the compulsions against using Gifts. She should be able to move her body freely. 

"Hang on a sec, I got a ~~~~~~~!  Details are hidden, though the ~~~~~ name is 'share the burden', which is promising. I'm glad at least one ~~~~~~~ here is having fun. You know if the ~~~~~~~~ dipped into psychoanalysis I'd have really expected it to be a Freudian. Ah, thank you Nayoki, that feels better."

And she stands up and stretches, sexily, and then pulls Leareth into a hug. 

Leareth, slightly startled despite the fact that he knew exactly what she was planning to do with her newfound mobility, tenses noticeably before forcing himself to relax again. 

He would probably be able to appreciate the hug a lot more if he weren't so confused and stressed about his inexplicable inability to parse several of the words she just said! He's pretty sure they were words, spoken clearly, it's just that nothing is resolving into meaning anything. 

"...You got a - something?" he says after a few moments. "Is that good? Is it a - reward of some kind - does it mean you have more powerful magic now or something? Or is it a next action in your quest?" 

"When we're closer I'll be able to explain it and you'll be able to hear it," she says tiredly. "I just - subconsciously, or whatever - don't want to go through every supervillain trying to fathom all the implications right up front, so no one gets it until we're close enough it'll actually help. It's probably good. It's definitely not going to hurt you. Like I said, I don't do that." It's so hard to figure out if it's a good idea.

Leareth can tell, because he's reading her mind, that she means it - that she's not going to hurt him, she 'doesn't do that', and so the - whatever it is - the force behind her magic, because Leareth is starting to get the definite sense that there's something there, something more than just a different kind of Gift - but it's not here to hurt him. As far as she knows.

He...is a little surprised to find that he mostly trusts that. 

And it helps, not just with having less of an anticipation of suddenly being set on fire, but also with - the hug being nice? It's unclear why that would be related, but. 

"That makes sense, I suppose. It does sound difficult and tiresome. I - apologize for being the sort of person who will just try to fathom all the implications of the ten different things I can think of that the words you tried to say might mean, even though almost certainly none of them are right. ...What do I actually need to do to be 'close enough' to you that I will be able to hear it accurately?" 

"We need a romance arc! This was a decent start! You kidnapped me and I seduced your loyal assistant and then you had me disabled so you could speak to me safely and you told me your tragic backstory and I told you my greatest insecurity. That's a fine opening. 

...generally the next thing Is sex but I am capable of noticing you're not ready. You could take me to your bedroom and neglect me entirely for several days while I writhe and beg you to have mercy and fuck me - no? We could try this again, but in boy mode, see if that does it?"

"I would not expect your physical sex to make a huge difference here but it might be worth trying? At the very least, I would find it fascinating to watch with mage-sight while you...change forms. And maybe have someone come to watch with Healing-Sight as well. - I had initially thought that the sex-shapeshifting might be something that you can do because everyone in your native species can do it, but it sounds like it was a new power you acquired because of the sex magic?" 

Nayoki clears her throat. 

"I think there are multiple ways of doing romantic courtship other than leaving someone in your bedroom to writhe and beg. Honestly, in this world it is normal for young people to do months of courtship before they have sex at all!" 

"There's a perk for 'no one will ever be disappointed by what's in your pants' and then the rest is just from putting a lot of ~~~~ into ~~~ - sorry, uh, from focusing on enhancing my physical form while being pretty sure that my ideal physical form is, you know, an incredibly hot man and an incredibly hot woman. 

Can you believe that 'no one will ever be disappointed by what's in your pants' has not once yet resulted in me having tentacles down there. .People just have low expectations, that's all, if they really thought about what they wanted I'd be getting so much more mileage out of that perk."

With this said she turns to blink at Nayoki. "- I mean I take your point but I'm not really huge on dates? I'm - a bit of a speedrunner, temperamentally."

The Thoughtsenser observing from outside the room is noticing that actually someone having tentacles "down there" would be incredibly hot and why did this never occur to him before– actually the better question is why is this occurring to him now, it's so far besides the point. 

Giggle. "I think Leareth is not going to be very into 'dates' either! He is - I mean, I cannot say he is impatient, exactly, he did spend a thousand years coming up with his current plan, he is just - not going to be very interested in candlelit dinners, or generally in date activities that are not directly about his mission or at least intrinsically interesting. I just think he probably needs to spend some more quality time with you before he can possibly be interested in sex?" 

She looks thoughtful for a moment. 

"He is generally interested in - magic research, and math, and he likes explaining his plans– no, Leareth, you do like explaining your plans. To people who are actually going to listen. Which I think she will." 

Usually if the Dark Lord's lieutenant will wingman once seduced she's a hidden objective but she didn't get a hidden objective for Nayoki. Maybe because it was a really easy seduction and honestly would have been hard to avoid. Supervillain plots have a tendency to be a bit railroad-y because the supervillains will kidnap you and so on; she doesn't mind, because making decisions isn't the fun part. 

"I don't usually talk about myself," she says, staring shyly at the ground. "No one understands and - it feels like they'll hate me, and be right to hate me, for having had that and not offering it to them."

“For having had - the sex magic powers? - I imagine it must be very hard to talk about just because of the problem where people often literally cannot understand the words you are saying.”

Nayoki looks, for some reason, very entertained. 

“Oh! Leareth is not going to hate you. He does not really do hating people, or - holding grudges - even when they deserve it. Personally, I think I would still be angry with Urtho if he had almost destroyed the world just to prevent me from winning a war!”

"Well, he probably did it because of some underlying deficiency of perspective or emotional safety that is fixable with sex, it's always something like that."

"...I have to say, that is an interpretation of Urtho I had not encountered before." Then Leareth's brief smile fades. "He was scared, I think. Of what I was doing in Predain. I am not sure if that is the kind of thing where sex can relevantly help with emotional safety." 

"Anyway!" Nayoki says brightly. "Leareth, you should pick something more fun and happy to tell her about! Also we can maybe go somewhere else? That has more furniture than this?" 

"...Sure." At this point, it definitely doesn't seem like letting Elfyn out of the Work Room containment is going to cause any worse problems. "Do you want to see my library?" 

"Yes! I would!"

Leareth can escort her over. 

The hallways on the way there are mostly bare stone, though very smooth and well-finished. The library itself is - surprisingly classy, for somewhere so generally low-tech? It has wood panelling, and tapestries on the walls for sound-damping, and rugs, and also a lot more books in one place than even the Palace library in Haven. There's an area with desks, one of them occupied by someone copying some text, and there are a couple of cozier reading-nooks with armchairs, and at one end of the room a cluster of people of widely varying ethnicities are apparently doing very complicated math, putting it up as an illusion rather than using a whiteboard. They immediately take it down when they see her with Leareth, though. 

Leareth lifts a hand. "You can stay. Nayoki, do you want to explain?" 

Sure, Nayoki - who did think to get properly dressed again before leaving the Work Room, but whose clothes are definitely disheveled - starts explaining what they know so far to these very very confused math researchers. 

Elfyn is not dressed, or not more than she's ever dressed, which is in a fishnet. Her glossy hair is wrapped around her in a way that makes no physical sense but maintains ambiguity about her genital situation. She's leaning on Leareth and beaming. "Is the whole base underground for aesthetic reasons or strategic ones?"

Leareth nods to his researchers and heads toward one of the armchair nooks. "Strategic reasons. The location is secret and it is not visible from the surface. ...Also we are operating out of the very far north, because this area is not claimed by any of the current powerful gods and is thus less subject to interference." 

"Second mention of gods, do I need exposition?"

Leareth sits down. "Yes. Probably. I am not sure what was explained so far, but it sounded as though your previous knowledge of gods was...different. The gods here are, approximately, very powerful magical entities that exist mostly in other planes and perceive the world primarily through Foresight. Many of them have human worshippers, and various types of relationship with them - the Shin'a'in on the Dhorisha Plains, for example, have an ancestral pact with the Star-Eyed Goddess to guard the Plains from outsiders. ...Which actually makes far more sense if some of the remains of Urtho's Tower are still intact. The Companions in Valdemar are also the result of a miraculous intervention by one or more gods, though Whoever was responsible has never tried to claim credit for it. King Valdemar prayed to all of the gods whose names he had ever heard for a way to maintain the stability of his country, and got...that." 

He waits to see if she has questions. 

"They, uh, mentioned that, but - I wasn't sure the gods actually existed? People will say things like that even if there aren't actually any gods. - uh, in my world some people say that the gods will send you to Hell if you go around being a girl and a boy at the same time and fucking everybody, and I never put much store in that but I did, like, check, when I got quests to save repressed trans Catholics and Mormons with the power of blowjobs."

“- Oh, people do that here as well. Claiming that the god they worship cares what sex acts people engage in, I mean. As far as I can tell, the gods mostly do not care unless it is instrumental for something else - the Star-Eyed probably does prefer that the Shin’a’in and Tayledras people not marry out. But the gods definitely do exist - and occasionally intervene in very blatant ways - though mostly They operate via subtle nudges and coincidences which only form a clear pattern after the fact.”

Leareth looks so unhappy as he says this.

"But they are unlike the Greek gods in that I cannot fuck them?"

Nayoki snickers.

Leareth blinks. “I…am not sure anyone has ever tried that. Or how it would even work. Does your kind of magic generally let you have sex with nonhuman entities even when that would not normally physically work?”

Nayoki is giggling too hard to speak out loud. :You might be able to fuck the Shadow-Lover! The name does seem rather suggestive:  

Leareth’s magic researchers are trying to discreetly listen in without appearing to be hovering or eavesdropping. This is such a strange conversation!

"Sex is more of a concept than a specific physical thing. Like, if I can find their sensory input and overwhelm it with pleasure and delight, then, yeah, I bet I'm supposed to solve this that way."

Leareth stares at her in what looks like utter amazement. 

"You...think...that is the kind of thing that might work? - I suppose I am not sure if gods are even the kind of entities that experience pleasure in a particularly human-recognizable way. And your sex magic would almost certainly need to be powerfully mind-affecting on the gods directly in order for Them to let you do that. But - if you could somehow cause Them to understand what I am trying to do here and why They are in the way, that...would just by itself solve the biggest problems in Velgarth. And the remainder would not make sense to address by invading any countries." 

It's really cute when Leareth looks all happy like that. 

"Well, I have yet to encounter something it would be useful to fuck which it is somehow impossible to fuck, so I bet it'll turn out fine. Do these gods have - backstories, traits?"

“As in distinguishing traits that differ between them? I think - yes, to an extent, though it is difficult to know how much of that is real versus - something that mortal worshippers came up with in order to try to make sense of beings which are fundamentally alien? The Star-Eyed Goddess has a - style, I suppose is the best word for it - of operating via avatars, often using formerly mortal spirits, and She seems to prefer social structures that are very tight knit and local, like tribal clans, not cities. Vkandis tends toward more blatant physical-world interventions - He has maintained a miraculous shield-wall around an entire country for two thousand years. And He sometimes sets things - or people - on fire, to make a point.” Leareth’s lips tighten very slightly as he says this.

Nayoki is much less reserved about it. “He set Leareth on fire! Twice! Merely for having the nerve to attempt peaceful communication with Him! Vkandis is a bastard.”

"I take it you're not into that?"

Leareth looks faintly nonplussed about this. “…Not especially, no. I mind it less because at least when I am assassinated I come back. I am by far not the person whom Vkandis has harmed the most.”

Nayoki raises her eyebrows, but lets this slide. “Does anyone like being horribly murdered? In a sexual way?”

"There are people who are into anything you can think of. ...your world doesn't have the internet. There are people who are into anything you can think of and a million things you can't."

Leareth's eyes refocus on her, sharply. "What is the 'Internet'?" 

"Something that people who aren't supervillains get."

"Is it mostly about having extensive records of - all possible variations of human sexual interest? Or does it also do other things?" 

(Industrializing medieval planets: probably good, right? Except tell them not to do it with coal lest they kill themselves from climate change down the line? Or maybe the people are right who think the coal was worth it and the climate change is "only" going to kill a hundred million people which is not worse than never industrializing in the first place? And definitely don't tell them to do it with nuclear plants, it's only through sheer luck humanity survived that, except are nukes obvious once you teach people chemistry. Probably not, right, Earth might not have figured that out if there'd never been a Hitler...and then there's the people who think factory farming more than cancels out every benefit of industrialization and will never stop once it has started, because it's just so hard to come up with anything more efficient than nature at growing meat fast. And if she decides she doesn't care about animals enough to let everyone be poor FOREVER for them (is it forever? presumably they'll industrialize eventually and she's just speeding it up?) it seems kind of likely that most industrial civilizations destroy themselves, one way or another. Fermi's paradox, except maybe some scientists solved that? But some others found their solution unpersuasive and she's not smart enough to know who's right.

(And if they're going to industrialize anyway and then destroy themselves anyway then the question is whether the hundreds of additional years being extant but medieval are net positive or not and it feels unfathomably arrogant to even take a guess, so she won't, she can't, though she is acting like she has a guess, isn't she, when she decides whether to give her local ambitious supervillain access to the internet.)

And all of that before thinking what magic has to do with any of this.)

"I heard it's mostly porn."

Elfyn is still not shielding her thoughts at all, which - almost has to be deliberate, she has all the Gifts, she's been in Velgarth long enough to know what they mean, and she's modelling Leareth as a 'supervillain' which ought to result in anticipating that he'll be even more ruthless than he will in actuality. 

So it's on purpose. Presumably because either she, or the mysterious force behind her sex powers - which seems to act a little like Foresight - predicts that this will result in seducing Leareth more quickly? 

(Leareth pauses, briefly, to check his own thoughts for any anomalous urges to have sex with Elfyn. He still doesn't think he wants to? He wants to talk to her.) 

"You know," he says gently, quietly, "I would not put it on you to make sure that our world's technological progress goes perfectly? I have been thinking about this for a very, very long time. You have power far beyond what I do, power that could - transform Velgarth, that might be able to fix all of our deepest problems at almost zero cost - but I am confident I have vastly more experience at - considering complicated questions and difficult tradeoffs. If you want to check my judgement, since I am a 'supervillain', I am happy to explain all of the reasoning behind various predictions, but - what you said before? That people are not meant to do this alone? If that holds for me, it holds for you as well." 

He lets out his breath in a little gust, feeling suddenly way more emotional than he was expecting. He's not sure what the emotion even is. 

"On another note. I think Velgarth is not, in fact, especially on a path to 'industrialize' sooner or later anyway. Not unless I - carry out my plan, which you would think is very evil and you would not even be wrong, just - I judge that even a huge one-time cost is preferable to the world continuing forever to be a place where children starve to death in winter. And our gods are deeply against progress and change, and - do not really seem to be the sort of entities that can perceive or care about the wellbeing of mortals. That is the deepest problem that needs fixing, here. I...think it is a simpler one, though, in some ways." 

"Have you considered that maybe they're right?"

"- It seems likely They could have some kind of information that I lack? Which is why I tried talking first. I - suspect that rapid change genuinely does harm Their interests; my best guess is that this is because it blurs Foresight, which would leave Them half-blind. I have a plan that would address this and - and if They were ever willing to, to let me try to convey it so They could see if it suited Them, I would obviously do that instead! But - I think that They do not especially weight the flourishing or suffering of mortals; I think it is not one of the ways that They can even parse the world. And as one of the mortals– well, not technically mortal but I am still human - I am not, actually, willing to let that stand forever. Even if beings that are individually far more powerful than me stand in my way." 

....Why is he so emotional about this??? Oh, right, it's probably the mind-affecting sex magic??? Leareth was just....expecting that to be mind-affecting on the dimension of sexual desire, not just - all of his completely unrelated feelings. 

- hug?

Leareth will take a hug! It sounds really nice and probably it won't make the mind-control worse and if it does he's already delegated to multiple outside layers of his staff to keep an eye on this and intervene if he's acting in ways that are uncharacteristic and also obviously stupid. So it's....fine. Probably. 

Hug. 

This isn't not worrying, in terms of Leareth behaving in notably uncharacteristic ways? But it's also adorable and Nayoki personally feels that it's really good for him, so she just tries to make herself as invisible and unobtrusive as possible while she watches. 

"'m not going to stop you. From doing your best whatever it is once you're not a supervillain. Stopping you would be - just as much the kind of decision I don't know how to make as anything else. 

But - 

- I think maybe most human civilizations wipe themselves out. So just, you know, either be careful or be sure you're fine with that."

How many human civilizations has she personally watched wipe themselves out??? Because that - kind of sounds like personal bitterness, there. 

Leareth has watched exactly one (1) civilization wipe itself out. More accurately, he was one of the main participants in the events that wiped it out. 

If he had never existed, would the civilization Urtho had helped build in Tantara never had a reason to destroy itself, and would that just have been better 

"...I am trying my best to be very careful. I will admit that my best was - not always very good, when I was young - but I have spent a thousand years on my current plan. And - I do not, actually, very much get the impression that the gods are - better at being careful and avoiding unintended wasteful consequences." 

"Leareth is the most careful person I have ever met or heard of in my entire life," Nayoki confirms cheerfully. "I am pretty sure that if he does manage to learn more about your magical powers, his default response would be to immediately put all of his operations on pause so he could think through all of the implications for a century or two." 

"Well, good for him. I hope that works." I guess if it doesn't I can warn the next guy in more detail.

Leareth feels suddenly very tired, and like he wants something about this interaction to be different, but he has no idea what, or what to do about it. 

(Nayoki feels like somehow she managed to say a thing that made it worse and less adorable? Gah.) 

"Do you mind if I go track down a staff person who'll want to beat me up and fuck me, now?"

"...No, I do not mind at all." 

"Maybe you should talk to the guy who was asking me earlier if I had gotten anything more detailed off you about what 'hentai' is. He seemed very curious."

She Thoughtspeaks the whole facility. 

Hey, everyone who has been turned on by vague rumors about me or things I said! Come take a number! Where taking a number is a convention from my homeworld where I start with 1, and then call 2 after that, and then call 3 after that, and so on! Numbers not necessarily assigned in the orders you arrive because I'm in a bad mood right now and am going to frontload everyone who wants to beat me up.

She gets a number of takers! Including from the Thoughtsenser who thinks tentacles-for-genitals is the most fascinating and intriguing sexual concept he's ever heard of, and has been trying and mostly failing not to fantasize about this for a while!

Also there's a mage who would be pretty interested in trying various magical restraints and hitting her with some levinbolts, he's always wanted to do that and he's picked up some rumors that she might be both into that and not likely to be maimed or killed by it? 

Yep for mysterious reasons she can only be killed with her secret weakness, which is secret, but not levinbolts.

There are a couple of people in the facility who failed to come take a number but should have, but whatever, she'll call them by name when it's their turn. 

What a recipe for a nice relaxing day without any moral dilemmas.

Leareth still has SO MANY unanswered questions, but he did get the hint that she doesn't really want to continue that avenue of conversation right now, and also apparently he can't trust himself to stay on topic when interacting with her, rather than ending up having tangential emotions that Leareth had thought he had finished processing centuries if not millennia ago. 

He spends a while taking notes by himself, going through everything he's learned so far and trying but utterly failing to fit it together into a coherent concept. His closest guess is that the source of Elfyn's magical powers is just a god - a god which is for some reason specifically interested in human sexuality - but that doesn't feel right, it feels like his mind is trying too hard to fit it into some known schema, and also it doesn't explain why she seems to think that she lives in a ballad with a plot. 

It's intensely frustrating to catch a glimpse of something powerful enough to solve all of his problems, but to have accessing it or even understanding it gated on...experiencing human connection and romantic feelings and wanting to have sex with her? 

Leareth spends a while mulling on whether he has any angles to just - nudge his brain directly in that direction. He's not sure. 

Eventually he goes to bed. Maybe in the morning he'll have had some key insight, and if not, probably Elfyn will keep chasing him? Since apparently he's her 'quest' in Velgarth? 

...And - very surprisingly from one angle, not surprisingly at all from another - Leareth finds himself in the frozen north, standing with an army at his back, facing a silver-haired man in ragged Whites. 

(Vanyel is not looking forward to this at all. It was definitely, absolutely justified, to ask Melody to unblock his Foresight so he could try to demand some answers from Leareth, because Elfyn was blatantly kidnapped from the middle of the Palace and there's only one obvious culprit. However, that doesn't change the fact that this is going to be the most awkward and agonizing social interaction of his entire life.) 

He walks forward, unhesitating. "Leareth. We need to talk." 

It doesn't take Leareth very long to orient. He's been mulling on the general situation for the entire evening. 

"- Yes, we do. I have a number of questions for you." 

Oh NO. 

"I suppose you have already gathered that I was responsible for detaining Elfyn Everyoung, the - alien with mysterious powerful sex-related magic - who was recently in Haven. I expect you to be unhappy about this, but - for what it is worth, she was not unhappy about it?" At least, not at the start. "She seemed to think it was the next 'plot hook' in her 'quest' to fight all the evils of the world by seducing them." 

Are they literally actually having this conversation, out loud, with their mouths? This is terrible. 

"We figured it was you, yes. I...can't actually say I'm surprised about his reaction– er, Elfyn was a man, with me. I knew about the - fact that they can change bodies, like that." Vanyel is now BLUSHING which is just humiliating. "But the thing about...plot, and quests, that came up before." 

Leareth can tell that Vanyel is uncomfortable with this, but he's not deterred by mass murder; he definitely isn't going to hesitate here just because of some social discomfort. 

"She - implied that her powers might be able to resolve my difficulties with the gods, here. Which would obviously be of the utmost importance. Inconveniently, she is literally unable to speak of it openly with me. Even when she tries, it just - the words do not parse." 

WHY IS HE SURPRISED that within a few candlemarks of meeting Elfyn, Leareth immediately jumped to scheming how to fight the gods??? Also aaaaaaaaaaah! 

"I already half-expect that - whatever is going on there - will be too thorough to route around in this way, but she is claiming that she will not be able to explain any more until we are 'closer', by which she mostly seems to mean our having had sex. I think you did have sex with her - them - so I am wondering if there is anything helpful you can convey?" 

WHY is this the thing that has to be happening in his life right now? 

...He does feel slightly bad for Leareth, though. Even if it's also on some level quite amusing to watch Leareth being so visibly confused. It feels like it needs a stronger word than just 'confused'. Discombobulated? Flummoxed? Befuddled? 

"I don't know if I can help you that much," partly because, to his sudden eternal humiliation, Vanyel is noticing that he didn't...really make that much of an effort to ask? It was just really awkward, after that first conversation where Elfyn conveyed that he literally couldn't talk about his magic. And even afterward, it was– he would look so sad and tired, sometimes, talking about his past, and that was awful. And there were plenty of not-even-slightly-awful things to do instead. 

"- Er, he did say at first that he couldn't tell me anything? Later on he, ummm, said he was from another world, somewhere very very far away. I know it sounds really weird and crazy but it's - not like it was less weird than...everything. He said he was here to add a," embarrassed cough, "um, a 'supervillain' to his 'harem.' ...I did immediately assume he meant you but I hadn't wanted to say anything before I had a chance to speak with the Senior Circle about it. Which didn't get resolved before you kidnapped him. And he didn't really ask." 

Leareth listens. Nods, thoughtfully. "I had noticed. That she is - not asking all of the questions that I would be asking. She seems -" 

Honestly, what he's thinking right now is that she reminds him a little of Vanyel, but that seems unproductive to say. 

"- she seems tired, sometimes, about the - scale of power and influence involved," he says instead. 

"...Oh, gods. Yes. That. He - so I don't know if this came up, yet, but he was - basically a normal person, before the magic chose him." Like Vanyel himself. "And he's...not entirely glad it did. He said he's - obviously not going to stop doing things with it, and he does actually really like the 'supervillain harem' thing, but he - did say to me that sometimes he gets really tired." 

Leareth nods. That...fits, with the rest of what he's seen so far. 

"I hope you were able to exchange some mutually satisfying hugs about your similar life experiences?" 

Why is this the conversation they're having?????? What is Leareth even trying to accomplish by asking him about that? 

Leareth sighs. It's not a very obvious sigh but it's there. 

"I am not sure where to go from here. This is - unexpectedly complicated. But, since I do place significant trust in your judgement, I might as well ask. Do you trust her?" 

What??? 

"I - hadn't really been thinking of it that way," Vanyel admits, after concluding that ten seconds of awkward silence is plenty of time to waste on mental flailing. "I...guess not enough to tell him about you. ....I never thought for a moment that he would hurt me. I think probably he won't try to hurt you either? He's going to want you to quit using blood-magic for all your infrastructure projects but I wouldn't be surprised if he can just pull out a better solution for that." 

"....Most recently she seemed very concerned that maybe telling us about advanced technological solutions to various problems would result in our civilization wiping each other out? I - was not sure how to be reassuring on that, or whether I could reassure her while being honest." 

Wow. Vanyel isn't sure he has any idea what to say in response to that. 

"- Are you all right?" he hears himself say, even though this is totally not something he intended to say out loud. 

Leareth shrugs, slow and deliberate. He looks...tired, more than anything else. 

"This is good news in expectation, I think, so - I am better than I was before?"

And there isn't that much to talk about, after this. It's hardly news to Leareth that the Senior Circle is alarmed and scared and angry about what he just did. Vanyel really really really does not want to go into detail on all of his various private adventures with Elfyn and he's grateful that Leareth doesn't ask. 

It's been a long year and he learned a lot of new songs? 

(It's not until afterward, waking with a start in the darkness, that Vanyel realized he completely forgot to say anything to Leareth about Urtho's diaries.) 

Leareth wakes briefly, takes some quick shorthand notes, and then goes back to sleep. He's going to need to be well rested, to face whatever tomorrow has to bring. 

Quest log:

The 'Right Side of the Bed' skill ensures that, if you are preparing a surprise for a lover to wake up to, they will wake up at the precise right moment and not at any of the many inconvenient wrong moments while the surprise is in progress.

Like most similar skills you can get ten hours of work out of the way that way so long as you don't think too hard about it.

This was good because I needed ten hours. The spot I'd picked was covered in snow, which I was immune to but Leareth wouldn't be; I cleared it all away at which point it was covered in ugly uneven rock, which I used my new ~magic powers~ to blast into clear smooth rock. Vanyel is the most powerful mage in the world or something; apparently this would be way harder if I hadn't slept with him. I tried doing fine detailing in the stone floor, failed so catastrophically I had to lower it another six inches to erase my error, settled for the natural patterning granite has when you polish it to a gleaming shine, and spent an hour trying to put up a very basic weather bubble so the weather would stop snowing on my prisoner. When I eventually succeeded it was a glowy golden dome with a bit of a cathedral vibe. I had blankets and pillows and so on from Leareth's storerooms, but they were identifiably his, which would kind of ruin the vibe, so I spent a while sewing them myself, which made them automatically silken, and sexy. I fast-travelled to an alpine meadow in my line of sight and picked bouquets of flowers. I froze some snow into ice-crystal vases for the flowers that would melt slowly and water them as they did.

(I am good at my job when it doesn't require fixing the entire world.)

Finally, I made brunch. Gil's old lunchbox really outdid itself; I had a stunning spread of cheeses and charcuterie and deviled eggs and avocado toast and fresh fruits and crepes and croissants and tea and coffee. it even coughed up boba, which I'd never been able to get it to do before. I threw the picnic blanket over a slab of rock and laid out the whole spread, humming to myself. 

Which is the moment the magic chose for Leareth to wake up. 

Leareth wakes up - 

- and is aware within about a quarter of a second, just from background input like the texture of the bedclothes and the feel of the air and the lack of any of his familiar wards, that he isn't where he expected to be.

At which point, still not quite fully alert, he immediately flings out all of his Othersenses, and in another quarter of a second he IS entirely awake, at which point he instantly, instinctively, tries to weave an unscaffolded Gate under himself. 

He should have, within another half-second or maybe a full second at most, been somewhere else and safe. Unfortunately the Gate does not work. 

Leareth just barely manages not to instinctively blast all of his surroundings with fire and lightning, because his brain has by now started to process the actual content, in more detail than DEFINITELY NOT HIS SAFE UNDERGROUND FACILITY, and so he's aware that Elfyn is right there and...calm...? And humming to herself? 

Leareth goes for Mindspeech rather than talking out loud, because this makes it easier to focus on controlling his breathing. 

:What: he sends, tightly and with no expression whatsoever, :are you doing: 

"I come in peace - awww, damnit, that's not innuendo in your language. We're safe; I did Mindhealing so you wouldn't immediately Gate away on me but Nayoki says that the way I see things in ribbons, set-commands take a long time to do and almost no time to undo. If anything weird happens I'll undo it at once, but I expect my magic to -" not try to throw action plot into a character scene "be allied with us in ensuring nothing threatens you. 

Nayoki agreed this would be good for you, and she said nothing was going to go horribly wrong in your organization if I borrowed you for a little while.

Brunch?"

Leareth was just apparently kidnapped - without ever waking up during the entire process of being moved, presumably via Gate, from his incredibly shielded and warded bedroom to a random outdoor spot in the wilderness, which feels like a huge slip in his caution and paranoia - and he can't leave and is maybe completely at the mercy of an alien being steered by an even more alien magical force mainly interested in creating 'plots' about sex? And this was done with the active cooperation of one of his most trusted colleagues? 

It's going to take him a lot longer than the duration of that speech to calm down enough that he can possibly be in the mood for brunch. 

That's fair. 

She's not shielding her thoughts. 

She's thinking that she doesn't actually want him to be scared. She has sometimes wanted people to be scared, if they're ruthlessly tyrannizing whole countries or whatever, wanted them to see why it's bad. 

She fucked like half Leareth's staff last night. She asked a lot of questions.

She's pretty sure he sees why it's bad.

Leareth also prefers not to be scared. It's not providing him with new information. The thing that would give him that information is talking, for which it would be really helpful if he could think rather than being distracted by the all-consuming desire to flee back to his warded underground base until the world makes sense again. 

He takes a deep breath. "I am - hoping you thought this out carefully and with reasonable input from Nayoki, but since I am not sure if Nayoki is in her right mind or if she was under the influence of mind-affecting sex magic that you literally cannot explain to me yet - where are we? Are we in a location that is anywhere close to the territory of any local gods?" 

That is, of course, kind of operating on the assumption that she in fact doesn't want to hurt him - and that neither does the force behind her sex powers. The latter is a lot harder to confirm one way or another by mindreading, but...at the same time, it's starting to seem like if the magic-source is opposed to his goals, then it's too late and he's already lost. So - for the moment, it makes sense to focus on the worlds where there's still a chance. 

"No." They're not far from his underground base, somewhere with a gorgeous view of the mountain peaks, and the stars at night. If he named himself after them he probably likes them. 

"...Right. Do you– can you explain at all why Nayoki thought this would be productive?" 

"I told her that I like you and I want to help you and that having done my due diligence on your staffing practices, I don't want to steal your organization out from under you. Which I would have, if you seemed horrible. I have learned some things from all my past supervillain boyfriends and girlfriends." Unspoken, but presumably understood: if I wanted to crush you, I would have.

 "I told her that my power - doesn't change who people are in their hearts of hearts, just which parts of it they let themselves feel. And I said that I thought I should probably run off with you now, and spend some time talking to each other outside your shell." Gesture at the mountains. "And I asked whether that would be disruptive to any operations and what reasonably security precautions against your gods intervening were. And I showed her how quick I can untie ribbons."

...Leareth nods. He's not relaxed, yet, but he looks somewhat less like someone holding himself on alert and ready to respond to a lethal thread on a fraction of a second's notice. (And, honestly, Leareth gives off some impression of that literally at all times.) 

"I would feel much more comfortable if I had more proof that you are right about your magic, and it does not - alter a person's goals or values. Since the force behind it is clearly intelligent and - has its own goals, or at least its own scripts - and for reasons which I expect you are coming to understand better, this makes me deeply uneasy." He makes a face. "I had been trying to figure out if I could just decide to be interested in sex with you, without first resolving all of that, since apparently if I do that then you will be able to speak more openly afterward? I - am not sure I can actually just choose to do that in a way where I would like it, though, and I am getting the sense that your magic might decide that did not count." 

"I don't actually know that the ability to explain the ~~~~~~~ is directly related to having sex. To our relationship, sure, but there are actually other elements to relationships, such as brunch. 

I do sometimes - read old Facebook posts of mine, to see if I can recognize the person who wrote them, and if the difference is just, uh, the great power great responsibility or something deeper than that. Sometimes I'm not sure. It's part of why - part of why I can't let it just change the whole world, right, what if it loses something important."

Leareth nods. This time, he restrains himself from immediately asking what Facebook is. 

Having brunch does seem much more uncomplicatedly pleasant than having sex, and also like it would interfere less with talking, unless the food is somehow supernaturally distracting. He scoots over to have a look at the options. Wow. That's a very impressive spread. Kings don't eat that well, in Velgarth - in general, not just the King of Valdemar, who doesn't exactly try for a life of luxury. 

He wonders if the feasts available in Tantara could have rivaled it. It's not like he would know. Maybe it's impossible for anyone to know. 

"That - does seem like an important consideration. I admire you for it. You are - much more careful than I was when I was still less than a century old."

He selects a croissant and some fruit, and switches to Mindspeech so he can talk while eating. :I also reread my own records, to check that I am not changing too much over successive lifetimes. I...wish I had anything left from my first lifetime, though: 

S/he's not really sure it's being careful. Probably being careful would be minimizing disasters, rather than just not doing stuff so the disasters aren't your fault if they do happen. Causing climate change wouldn't be careful so s/he's not sure just ignoring it is.

It figures that the quest about not having dilemmas anymore would involve thinking about the dilemmas all the time but also it sucks. Good think Leareth seems to find it sexy. 

:Was the war with Urtho your first lifetime?:

The croissants are really good.

:I think there is a case to be made that if you are inexperienced and do not have a sophisticated understanding of the domain where you are operating, it will - result in less total harm, in expectation, to err on the side of trying fewer things. This is obviously not how I have tended to work, and - it is also the case that this rules out many opportunities to accomplish very good things. But it - plausibly would have been better, for Velgarth overall, if Ma'ar as a young man had - erred on the side of not doing things. That was in my first time, yes. I was...hasty, and clumsy in many ways: 

:There's a case to be made but I don't really buy it? Or, I mean, I wholeheartedly agree that I could do way worse than doing nothing. But I could probably also do better, if I tried, which I don't because it'd suck so bad. And at some point it's like - you're in a multi-ton lightning-powered rail-tracked passenger-mass-transit-vehicle going off a cliff and you're like, 'well, I'm no engineer, who am I to be steering this?'

- not sure that made sense. I usually don't talk about this stuff but I got promised that this arc I can resolve all my emotional issues, which is gonna require talking about them.:

Leareth ducks his head. Closes his eyes. 

(That is such a metaphor and he has to step on the urge to immediately ask a dozen different questions about multi-ton lightning-powered rail-tracked passenger-mass-transit-vehicles and how you even DO that.) 

:I imagine Vanyel might understand the way you feel better. I– my underlying tendency is probably to make mistakes in the opposite direction. But I do...understand it at all, I think, that it is - exhausting, and terrifying, to - exist in a world where there are no safety rails, no guarantee that anything will turn out all right. And it is a different kind of stressful and terrifying if you know that you might have the power to do something about it. Because...in a world that does not have safety rails, enough power to fix everything is also more than enough to destroy everything, and good intentions are not enough, and - I am not sure that you ever get to know, until the final outcome - at which point it is too late to change course - whether you could have succeeded in principle...:

It is KIND OF ABSURD how much Leareth is having emotions about this! He sets down the boba that he was about to try, and lets out his breath in something that's half a bitter chuckle and half a quiet sob. :- Your mind-affecting sex magic is being very rude. I do not normally get so upset about this: 

:Vanyel understands. But he's like 'well, I'll just try my best to do the right thing even when I don't know what it is and am terrified of getting it wrong', and I'm like 'well I guess I'll just not do anything about this'. : She eats a cherry, sensuously.  

Why is her cherry-eating so distracting??? This is - presumably also just the mind-affecting sex magic, actually. 

Leareth takes a cherry as well. For some kind of absurd reason, he feels slightly competitive about eating cherries in a sensual way. He is presumably just going to lose that competition but apparently he still wants to play. 

:I mean, probably part of it is that he has a Companion. Also I was speaking to him regularly in dreams for sixteen years and I would like to think I can claim some of the credit for his - willingness to try: 

Pout. :I tried to get a Companion - well, technically I just tried to fuck them - and none of them would go for it!:

:.....Of course you did. Why am I even slightly surprised? I think you might need to fuck the gods until They are on your side first, though. Companions - were made by a god or gods, and I I think have certain restrictions on them, as a result. I am not sure of the details, but I would not be very surprised if they had been having doomy Foresight feelings: 

Leareth is noticing that he feels a lot more relaxed, all of a sudden? He wouldn't have thought it was possible to feel this relaxed while still under a Mindhealing effect blocking him from Gating out if anything bad happened, and he can't pin down what actually happened in the last few minutes that was so reassuring. But something did. 

"See, that just feels like the wrong order of operations! Fucking a god is way kinkier than fucking a Companion, so if I were designing this path I'd go first Companion then Heartstone then god. - Vanyel told me to not fuck the Heartstone. Which, I mean, it's called a Heartstone, I am absolutely supposed to fuck it."

Wow. Every time Leareth thinks he's starting to get used to Elfyn and the bizarre way she thinks, she comes out with something like THAT. 

:...I am suddenly very curious how you would do that, physically! I am not sure I actually want to know the answer: This is pretty tangential but it's easier to talk about than the SCREAMING HORROR at this concept. 

"You know, lots of people go into their first sexual experience without knowing exactly what they're doing! But they have instincts, and they have a strong sense of when they're getting warmer, so to speak, and they fumble blindly towards the thing they can feel that they desperately want. If you fuck enough abstract concepts you get to be a fumbling virgin a hundred times over, with no idea of what it even is you want or how to reach it, just hungry and desperate and hill-climbing for pleasure wherever you can find it."

Leareth feels like he maybe needs to see some concrete examples of this before it makes any sense! 

"...Huh. Can you fuck abstract math concepts? That sounds as though it could be hot." Wait what did he just say. 

"Well, I don't know. You'd have to explain an abstract math concept for me to try."

"....Do you want me to do that?" 

"You wave something it might be possible to fuck in front of me and then ask if I want you to let me try to fuck it? Of course I do!!!"

Then Leareth, grinning, is going to explain the complex exponential function. Complete with an illusion'd visualization for her:

Elfyn flops down in the bed Leareth just got up from, closes his eyes, and concentrates. "Are you just able to visualize it? Can you describe how I visualize it, that seems like an important skill to ~~~~~ for sex with math concepts."

"I can visualize it but it's harder to hold all the details purely in my head. I suppose it might help if you were the one casting the illusion yourself and shaping it..." 

He can explain how he does the mental calculations for how to fill in the shape of the function, and how he maps it visually so that it's pretty, and - ooh, hmm, actually fractals might be especially fun for this. They rate very highly on beauty and visual compellingness compared to how conceptually complex they are." 

He can show her one he thinks is particularly sexual-feeling.  

She has, at it happens, not picked up the skill 'sexy math visualization' before, so at first she's slow at it, and has tons of questions about how substituting a different number would produce a different image, and whether there's a change that'd make the image close in a different place, or be thicker, or be thinner.

But the nice thing about skills is that once you level them enough, they get easier, close to automatic; you can do them without errors and without mental effort. Math visualization is apparently a difficult skill to level, compared to sexy dancing or sexy fruit-eating or sexy naked sparring or something; it takes half an hour before the pictures start coming easily, without lots of fussing around trying to imagine what's going on and checking it against Leareth's illusion. 

Once it does, though, then it's there, clear and beautiful in her mind's eye, and she can see -

- another illusion that'd go with it, that'd take where it gives, give where it takes, see where they won't overlap nicely and which numbers to change so they do -

- she puts up her own illusion, overlapping his -