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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. 

"I - however you want to play it, my–" He makes a slightly frustrated noise. "I want - it feels like it'd be right to call you - something, a title, I just don't know what." 

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Raised eyebrow. "Well, you could give me a title. Lord of Imperial Mood Management. There you go."

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Head duck. (INTERNAL SCREAMING no that goes in the box. This is only the hot kind of scary.) 

"Yes. My lord." 

- this would probably go much better if he could ask for things but Altarrin is dead and nothing is okay and he cannot quite get himself entirely into a sexy mood. On the bright side, he's fairly sure Caris can do it to him whether or not he likes it, and that thought is definitely the hot kind of scary. 

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She's not entirely sure she's parsing that right, but - "Hey. You're mine, so I'm going to take good care of you, and that means I will only tolerate so much moping about duty, among other things. It doesn't mean you need to do anything differently; when I want something different, I'll arrange it. You'll know what I want because it's the thing that will happen. Do you understand?"

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He takes a deep, slightly shaky breath. 

 

“I - think so. It can’t— outside here,” vague hand gesture, “I do have - power. Duty, I guess, if you want to call it that, it’s still - real, and sometimes it’s what will be on my mind.” Based on his tone, this is not completely obvious to him. “But here - yes, I’ll be yours, and you can do whatever you want with me, and it’s - I want that. I never - even realized how badly. And if you want me not to, um, mope, then,” headduck, “I’ll do my best.”

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"You will try your best for me," he says warmly. "I appreciate that about you. And I won't, actually, stand in the way of your duties. I want your empire to be safe, I want it to prosper, I want to kill the gods who killed Altarrin and make him proud of us. - but right now I want you to forget all that, and strip for me."

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Eeeeeeeeeee~

The Emperor of the Eastern Empire will strip for his beautiful terrifying sex-changing wizard boyfriend from another world, and try very earnestly to be good.

He still spends kind of a lot of it slightly having a panic attack, or feeling like he’s watching himself from a great distance, but it’s actually - easier, when he mostly has to worry about whether Caris is happy and pleased.

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Ellitrea has a few things to wrap up, and they didn’t say in the message it was urgent. (She maybe, perhaps, is slightly putting it off because talking about Altarrin - seeing the place where he died - is going to hurt.)

She takes the Gate-network over via two nexus points, a little after sunset, carrying some of the records she’s been summarizing in order to help with the handover to Altarrin’s eventual replacement.

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The site has clearly been secured; the agents managing it look perfectly normal, the sort of investigators you'd expect for this sort of business. They're happy to take Ellitrea's notes - just to put them somewhere safe while she talks to the person managing the investigation.

(She is not supposed to do Thoughtsensing. 'You do not read the mind of the people asking you questions' is just a sort of basic thing, here; if she does, she will be politely told to stop.)

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Of course. Ellitrea is a little bleary - it's been a long day, and yesterday was a longer day - but she's pleased they're being efficient, and will try to be efficient on her side of things. She thanks them for their work. 

(Everyone is predictably angry and wants answers, and Ellitrea thinks she actually might be more angry than that, because most people have no idea just how many problems Altarrin could have solved, with the resources and the plan that clearly got the gods to escalate even further against him. 

She's also quietly frustrated with him for not delegating the mine troubleshooting - it's not like he was doing it on the Emperor's orders - and staying safe. They needed him.) 

 

She will follow directions very cooperatively to wherever they want to question her. She's not intending to lie, certainly - you just don't like to the Office of Inquiry, and besides she wants their investigation to succeed - but she's not planning to instantly volunteer everything. Who knows how many of Altarrin's secrets are actually relevant. 

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And Mage-Inquisitor Kastil will not, in fact, be in the room with Ellitrea, because he doesn't know just how contagious Carissa's powers are. One of his loyal subordinates, Mage-Inquisitor Bastrea (the short form of the titles not being distinguishable is an advantage; it means every agent of the Office of Inquiry has the full reputation of the whole office), will be; they have a private, secure version of the communications-spell used only in the Office, and so she can speak for him.

She'll offer Ellitrea a seat, offer her a drink, commiserate with her about how horrible it is Altarrin died ("He was a great man",) and then while various of Kastil's other agents go through all the documents Ellitrea brought, Bastrea will start asking what, exactly, happened in the period before Altarrin's death.

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(The documents Ellitrea brought are...really boring, for the most part? 80% of Ellitrea's normal workload is scheduling loyalty checks and doing interrogations as needed; there are of course standard policies, but every Archmage-General has their own preferred way of doing things, and she's hoping to summarize Altarrin's style so she can run its pros and cons by the new Archmage-General, and if he disagrees, at least be able to give clearer instructions to the junior Thoughtsensers she'll end up training. Or a handover to her replacement, if Altarrin's replacement wants to bring in their own directly-loyal Thoughtsenser, which is common but by no means universal.) 

 

You would think commiseration and condolences would feel good, but actually Ellitrea just feels numb. She'll absolutely take a drink, though. 

"- I assume you know better than I do what happened between when he Gated up here and when he died. I left the south earlier than him, too, he was jumping the queue to take a point-to-point Gate-routing and I used the standard routing. I doubt much happened, I left Stormhaven - three candlemarks before him? He'd wanted me to find him a replacement clerk, his usual one was injured when we set up a diplomatic meeting as a trap to try to lure the cultists of Atet out." They had fallen for it, too, and Altarrin had been right that they could pull it off, none of his people actually died. "Anyway, he sent me back with a few messages, routine things - I don't know if I remembered to bring those notes."

And one for Carissa, but 'personal messages for the girl he's protecting' isn't obviously in scope for the investigation, it's sort of private, it's very high context and a state secret she is not going to just spew out unless very directly ordered (this is, in fact, policy, the Office of Inquiry isn't trying to be terrible for infosec), and - other than the fact that the mine was partly for her, but surely they know that - she can't see how Carissa could have been involved. Maybe by making Altarrin sad? She's not going to spontaneously volunteer random things about Altarrin's emotional life either. 

"Um. It's - we had an extremely hectic few days while I was there - he'd called me out a few days after that mage Final Striked in the basement of the meeting-house and killed the entire council. He was interviewing replacement Mage-Generals first, I think, and laying some preliminary plans for rooting out the resistance, but even with the pastwatching spell he was having trouble tracking them all the way to their hideouts. So I was down there for a few days - I'm sure you know the calendar dates better than I do, at this point, it's been - a lot. We worked long days. He was doing a lot of magic - he doesn't delegate pastwatching, says he can get more detail on it than anyone more junior. I think we were both going to bed with reaction-headaches. - And then we had an unlucky encounter and he got thrown across a room. He did have a Healer patch him up before he transferred over here, I don't think he was - impaired - but I'm sure he was tired. I worried, a little, but–" Helpless shrug. "I'm sure you know men like that, and - when they've always come back fine every time before -" 

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Bastrea will nod sympathetically, and murmur the appropriate things, and say that yes, it was extraordinary that Altarrin came back, and get Ellitrea to go over it in more detail, again, and again, and again, especially about the 'unlucky encounter' until Ellitrea's sick of it, while the scribe eavesdropping on the meeting writes down everything. 'Interrogator' is not a job for the impatient. The Office of Inquiry wants to know everything, "any detail, no matter how small, might prove to be the key to the investigation."

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....They can go further back but Ellitrea did not actually bring her personal, non-loyalty-check notes or her calendar planner, and is not sure she'll get the dates right - she understands if they want to request that from the capital, though, she can give instructions for her clerk to locate it and any other relevant documentation. 

Altarrin had made a briefer trip south before this. Came back intensely frustrated about the entire temple of Atet and the culture of the Holy Empire of Ithik - she doesn't think that impaired his judgement on the second trip down, aside from the fact that every trip is exhausting and leaves him returning to a backlog, and he's always worked very hard but he's not as young as he was...

(She is not crying it is extremely undignified to cry while being questioned in the investigation of an assassination, even if you are very tired and have had two drinks and the interrogator is being very kind about everything.) 

- his last away trip before that was actually to the mine as well, during the initial setup. It was much less eventful and she can't actually remember him having any particular concerns about the Vkandis cultists when he returned. She thinks he just went himself because, though it's not his current role, he has a very extensive and broadly scoped mage-engineering education as well, he's (not crying even a little bit) so knowledgeable, there are so many things where he was probably the best in the Empire... 

 

 

(She is not precisely avoiding mentioning Carissa as 'Altarrin's current woman', but it - really doesn't come up that much in his day to day responsibilities as Archmage-General, and she is still going to hold off on going into the side of the project that's a state secret until they order her to tell them. Her compulsions, in fact, aren't actually going to let her share anything that's not in the cover story until so ordered.) 

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There were! He was! His death is a tremendous loss.

Yes, they'd appreciate it if she'd ask the clerk to bring the notes. (They do have a Thoughtsenser, the Office of Inquiry doesn't have many but it has more than none, and she's watching Ellitrea from well outside the room. If Ellitrea tries to send any coded message, the Office will know and the message will not get through. But they're being polite.)

They would like to know why Altarrin set up the mine, if she knows, but they aren't trying to press on this point; just that it could be very important.

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Ellitrea does not appear to be trying to pass any coded messages. It hasn't even slightly occurred to her that the investigators might suspect her of it. She's so tired and she's never actually been in an interrogation as part of a real Office of Inquiry investigation into the death of someone important who she worked closely with and who mattered to her. It's clear in her thoughts that she's mostly exhausted and finding this deeply emotionally draining. - she really hopes Carissa is all right, but she's still not thinking of this as very on-topic, and it also hurts, so she's not dwelling on it. 

 

 

...It's a project that he was trying not to draw attention to - she doesn't know all of it, and not all of what she does know is hers to share unless the Office of Inquiry explicitly rules that it's relevant. 

(....she knows kind of a lot. There is much more in the category of 'not hers to share'. But there are, in fact, things that she knows Altarrin didn't tell her. Presumably Carissa is now the only one who knows, unless Ketar somehow ended up knowing - she knows he hasn't told her everything either - or unless Carissa started confiding in Merda much more than she was aware of...) 

Anyway. Short and non-classified version: Carissa, a young woman from Aksell, student at a reclusive mage-school and with a very unusual Wild Gift, knew the Archmage-General's face from earlier travels. Her Wild Gift included the ability to (very very expensively, and she thinks in this case only with the aid of a teacher she left behind) replicate a Gate, or maybe something more like an overpowered version of the highly specialized Fetching Gift? Since she can't do it again, they haven't been able to study it, but it'd fit, most of her techniques imitate Mind-Gifts more than mage-techniques - she can do translation, she can do headbands that make you feel, and to some extent verifiably be, sharper and more awake, or more confident and charismatic. 

(This is not entirely true, though per Ellitrea's thoughts, most of the Gift-capabilities part isn't false, just incomplete. This is the version that isn't a state secret that Altarrin never gave her clearance to share. Ellitrea's compulsions are really good at getting her to not dwell on the state secret part.) 

She works with artifacts. They use 'spellsilver', thus the high priority mine project. She can develop more over time and was working on several, including (and this was debatably a state secret but it does seem relevant) one that imitated a limited version of Thoughtsensing, for Altarrin. She has one that makes you need less sleep; Altarrin was still working himself way too hard, in Ellitrea's opinion, but if anyone had the impression he was sleeping concerningly little, actually he's basically fine on two or three candlemarks a night now. 

He was keeping it quiet because, one, it's clearly a huge resource and one everyone would be trying to grab, and two, Carissa had a very bad time of it, and needed a lot of reassurance and costly signs of safety to be able to work to the best of her ability. Anyone who's worked with Altarrin knows that he takes the needs of his staff and allies seriously. 

(This part is absolutely true, according to Ellitrea's thoughts. Poor Carissa.) 

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Yes, Kastil thinks, that is the story he already picked up, just with a little more detail. It is not, in fact, new. (The fact that Carissa is the only one who knows what is going on with Carissa is, well, idiots, but nonetheless fits his extremely disturbing pattern.)

 

Back in the interrogation room!

... That is very interesting. (They do not say this, but:  The Office of Inquiry would in fact like to know more... but it will circle around, and nod, and go over the things he was doing before Carissa arrived, and then her notes and her calendar can arrive and they can go over the schedule page by page, confirming everything...

And then (once she's not feeling quite so tense, and, also, will be completely exhausted) they can say that, actually, the Office of Inquiry does think that this secret is very important to their investigation, and they would like to know exactly what they aren't being told.

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Ellitrea had known that the Office of Inquiry was thorough but somehow she hadn't expected that to mean interrogations that lasted, like, eight candlemarks. Do they realize she was up early today and worked a full day before coming here she is not going to say that, they're being polite and she is going to be polite back and not even a little bit snappish. It's not like there's anything she can really be usefully doing for the situation in the capital, though she does very much hope it's going all right. 

She will, with as much patience as possible despite being increasingly frazzled, go over everything repeatedly, summarize the last year, come back to her notes and calendar and double-check dates. There are no major discrepancies, though she can give them more detail on various Carissa-related requests that roughly match what she's said so far. Altarrin was trying to teach Carissa to navigate court politics. It was important for collaborating on their project. 

 

She did grow up at court. As long as they haven't explicitly asked for the parts they aren't being told, she will very assiduously mention whenever something is 'the non-secret part of the story', and not think about the secret part enough for even a good Thoughtsenser to catch onto everything. 

 

(They'll probably get a bit more emotional subtext, as she gets tireder. Carissa and Altarrin were not in fact sleeping together, though this isn't rare for him. Carissa was - insecure, felt like he didn't want her. She thinks Carissa was actually sort of hurt, when he kept leaving on dangerous missions rather than prioritizing his own survival, not that Carissa would ever have said this out loud in a million years, Carissa's - home culture - did not exactly reward that.) 

 

 

 

She cries, a couple of times, though she quickly gets herself under control. She will admit, sort of, that she feels guilty - that she feels like she failed Altarrin by not - taking on more of his burdens, pushing him to rest more and delegate more. He was under so much pressure. 

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The interrogator will continue offering sympathy and support for how horrible all of this is, but they do need a little more, they do need a little more - 

For instance, now that she's gone over everything, they want the secret part of the story, that they are not being told. They think it is necessary for their investigation.

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- She was really expecting that a lot sooner. It's - she hadn't thought it was directly relevant but she supposes it's indirectly relevant to, well, why the gods threw so much at this. Why it was too much, when Altarrin has always been tough enough to survive it before. 

 

Can she get that in writing with the seal of an authorized Imperial order, her compulsions seem to run a lot through loyalty to Altarrin and she realizes this is the best thing she can do to help him, now, the only thing, he would want them to patch whatever the flaws were in their system, just, she's - slightly having trouble. 

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They understand. Altarrin was a great man, and truly loyal to the empire. Here's the authorized Imperial order to assist the inquiry into Altarrin's death however it is in your power. 

(This is a fairly standard thing, gotten sensibly in advance and in writing, from the Emperor. It is not a specific imperial order to her. It's just that quite often you get provincial governors, say, who consider themselves to be above the Office of Inquiry if it doesn't have a generic Imperial Order to Assist to swat them with.)

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It might not be the only or even most important thing, she might be able to finish his project for him and that's the most important thing that's ever happened, so much more important than just headbands, and she's not sure how much anyone other than Altarrin understood his vision and probably she can't be him but still it might not be too late to salvage. 

 

 

(This line of thought is very quiet and does not actually specify "the project.") 

She'll give them the secret details, though, in a kind of disorganized and fragmentary order because most of this she doesn't have written notes on (surely Altarrin had them but if so she does not have the faintest idea where he kept them, he definitely has secret places for that and now they'll never know.) 

Carissa is not from Aksell and doesn't have a Wild Gift. She's from another world. Called Golarion. Different magic - it's called arcane magic or wizardry, it's not a Gift - and it has different gods. Some of them scarier, there's one who rules a country directly like Iftel but also deliberately makes it as horrible as possible and tortures people and keeps slaves. 

- but they also have - places where souls go after they die. Actual places, literal other planes as far as she could tell, where souls - have actual afterlives, experiencing and changing. There are - a lot of them, in some weird classification system, uh she cannot actually remember the exact details but some are good and some are awful. 

The gods can give humans magic. 

Carissa grew up in the country ruled by Asmodeus, the god of "Hell" - one of the horrible afterlives - who tortures people a lot. She was frightened and often literally tortured into loyalty. She eventually had some realizations, decided to fight Asmodeus. Then ended up here in some extremely baffling series of events. 

 

Didn't trust Altarrin at first but she thinks they talked it out and came to an agreement. Carissa - very badly wanted to fix the thing where souls, here, don't really go anywhere when they die. 

She doesn't know if they had more of a roadmap for that then 'get spellsilver, make magical artifacts, eventually make things more public'. Plausibly they did. She thinks Altarrin kept a lot of plans to himself. 

 

 

What else can she tell them. She's– 

 

- oh right this is relevant, Carissa can shapechange with her magic and, when she was worried Altarrin would get bored of her or get himself killed she decided to seduce the Emperor, as a man (and then sell it by offering that as a woman she could bear his heirs, maybe?). Altarrin was aware of this. It seemed like a dubious plan - and Carissa is definitely not entirely a safe person - but Altarrin wasn't worried. She has the loyalty compulsions, she's not stupid, and - the Empire is something she respects, something she wants to succeed, one thing that it had in common with Cheliax is being the wealthiest and most magically advanced place in the world, and it doesn't torture people. Carissa had no incentive to betray the Empire. 

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Another world.

Right.

Probably a lie. Probably this is just some kind of complicated trick, designed to get Altarrin's guard down. (Or Ellitrea's guard down, whichever that is.) Mage-Inquisitor Kastil is vaguely aware that there are other landmasses on this world, and the odds that she's from one of them are tremendously greater; there being other worlds is fantastically unlikely.

Possibly - 

- This is the worst possible possibility but what if one of the gods from her place, say the one from her country that she presumably worships managed to take a ride - or she's planning to let it come over she might claim she doesn't, this isn't worth following out, the odds of this being important are minuscule but if she does serve a god who runs a pocket dimension where he tortures people and wants to run the Eastern Empire directly that would be the worst possible thing that could ever happen -

I'm sorry she's what. What. What.

(Kastil is not giving much in the way of instructions to Bastrea, who is therefore being very polite and nodding a lot and saying she understands this is very strange and if there's anything else Ellitrea can remember...)

...

So as soon as she tries to seduce the Emperor, Altarrin mysteriously dies. And she has mysterious powers that are not, in fact, from Aksell, and can use 'spellsilver' - which Altarrin just mined her quite a lot of - to have mental effects on people that resemble Gifts but do not line up with any known Gifts in any way.

... If they intend to consider her world as being at all the way Ellitrea described it, then the principle of simplicity suggests that her powers come from her god, though of course it's usually unwise to get caught up in the details of a fantasy she's spinning.

Focus on the important things: As soon as she meets Altarrin, he's seduced by her (not in the literal sleeping with sense, possibly) and begins giving her lots of resources to build equipment, which she does. She gets headbands on everyone, gets a device made to mimic Thoughtsensing, and then she goes to seduce the Emperor... and succeeds, because she has outside-context powers... apparently including shapeshifting, which ought to be impossible by magery...

There are multiple levels of 'everything is worse than it was last week', and Kastil is so tired. But, well, someone has to do his job or it won't get done.

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Ellitrea will go over everything for them. She realizes this is bizarre and probably really terrifying if you're hearing about it now - after Altarrin's death - and not, like Altarrin did, smashing Carissa's spells with raw mage-energy and badly injuring her in the process (because she wasn't expecting their Gifts any more than they were expecting wizardry), keeping her unconscious with Healing while he did a frantic research project on the god-names they'd glimpsed in her thoughts, determining something was odd and waking her up under enough compulsions that she couldn't finish thoughts - 

 

She had considering praying to a god, for help or just answers. Not Asmodeus, though. Uhhhhh. Possibly they would have to ask - Carissa - about the other gods, but there are some that Altarrin even sort of agreed might not be terrible. There's one dedicated to fighting Evil and Asmodeus in particular, maybe? ...This was a really long time ago and she has mostly not been the one reading Carissa's mind since. Ketar's done it more, including after the point when (Ellitrea is pretty sure) Altarrin and Carissa went off to a secure location that was not anywhere near Iftel and had a heart-to-heart, and Altarrin arranged to give Carissa a set of incentives where she could best achieve what she wanted here, working for him. 

 

...Carissa's world doesn't have Foresight anymore. For some reason that Ellitrea does not entirely understand but possibly involves gods being murder-able? Carissa did not, uh, know the details. She would presumably have to be vastly more powerful anyway to murder gods. 

 

Carissa was deeply indignant about most of the local gods, which she considered bizarrely unhelpful and incapable of communication, and also outrageously against, you know, progress and magical advancement and material wealth and all children learning to read. 

 

Ketar had a crush on Carissa which she worried would be a problem but with some firm advice (including from Merda) she thinks he got over it. He was probably mostly worried about Carissa being mistreated by Altarrin. Carissa had some much worse relationships in Cheliax, which is, you know, unsurprising, country ruled by a torture god and everything.

 

She...will admit that Carissa's arrival was - probably implicated in Altarrin's death, in a purely causal way, it's not a coincidence that the gods made a much more involved attempt on him within six weeks of Carissa's arrival. Partly the spellsilver mine, of course, and Altarrin being - willing to take a greater risk, because the upside of Carissa solving the Empire's problems was worth it to him, but also... Uh, she can't remember when they had this conversation, but he thinks the gods dislike Foresight noise. Carissa, as an out of context problem, is noisy. Altarrin wants to use her out-of-context abilities to push back further against the stupid awful gods than they've ever managed before. Presumably the gods disapprove. It's - not Carissa's fault, that Altarrin is - the person he is, somehow the gods already disliked. But she'll acknowledge the - relation. 

(She thinks Carissa was sad. Not devastated, she - tried hard not to get attached - but sad, and angry at Velgarth's gods for destroying so much. She didn't actually read her mind, though, it was just body language and - knowing her as a person.) 

 

 

 

She'll maybe dig up a few bits and pieces like that but she's running low on new information and also the ability to have coherent thoughts. It's nearly dawn. 

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Then that's the point where they hit her with ten different compulsions simultaneously. (Not to contact anyone else, not to use her Gifts, not to resist, not to attack anyone, not to leave the room, to obey orders...) - all phrased very carefully, not quite in the standard way that anyone at court is used to thinking around, so that she can't just evade them with practiced habits, snip her previous compulsions (they will, of course, replace them afterwards), and watch very carefully that nobody else in the area starts at all when they do this.

Then they can provide her with coffee, and then they can get started going over everything she said, rather less politely, just to make sure there's nothing she left out. They have no intention of using torture - it's inefficient, when you have Compulsions and thoughtsensing both.

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