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I know everyone wanted a thread where Leareth fixed all of the Survivorverse's problems, but this is not that thread.
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:Actually, I want to come talk to you as soon as possible so I can figure out what is going on with you! ...It does seem escalatory to leave the set-command in place. I will - I think if I ask him to give his word that he will not initiate violence here, I will - at least be able to get a sense from his mind of whether he means it?: The man has sort of guessed about Thoughtsensing but she doesn't think he's predicted Mindhealing Sight yet. :And I can give a quick explanation, and then leave someone else to answer his questions?: 

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Leareth still doesn't like that! He...is having trouble pinning down a line of argument for why, especially on strategic lines, it mostly just feels - distasteful, incorrect, bad

:All right: 

He lets the Healers help him to his feet; it turns out he needs the help more than he was expecting, his shields may have protected him from serious injury but he's still bruised, and feeling shaky with the aftermath of the stress reaction. 

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:I will take off the - paralysis: no need to explain how it works, :and explain a little more very soon: Nayoki sends. And then waits until Leareth is definitely multiple rooms away, on a different floor entirely, and in a shielded Work Room where he's the only one keyed to the shields. 

:This will take a minute and feel odd: she warns, and then starts unpicking the set-command, which is much slower and more laborious than placing it. 

(From his point of view, it won't feel like that much, except that he starts getting back control of his body in bits and pieces, and also it sort of feels like the corners of the room are softening and melting.) 

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:I understand:

(Reading his mind, It is clearly surprising to him that it takes more than a moment; his instincts had categorized ?magic? in a great many ways, and "mental effects that can be instantly applied in an instant and removed slowly and with hallucinations" was not part of any category.)

He will not attempt to start any fights while he's becoming un-paralyzed or once it's occurred, though he is thinking of mechanisms for how he could still control his armor while physically paralyzed; he doesn't think it's physically possible but someone could still do it if he selected the right person... (with a ?rare magical ability?) and he's checking a long list of various other people and discarding most of them as possibilities, either because their ?gift? doesn't line up, or because they wouldn't work well with him and his organization (a possibility that clearly involves a risk of bodily harm to both sides).

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The Healers get Leareth to one of the secure Work Rooms (the one that's behind a hidden door, that a stranger to the facility shouldn't be able to spot at all from the hallway), and lock it, and his mages put up even more shields to add to the permanent ones on the room. 

The Healers would kind of rather have Leareth in the infirmary right now, but failing that, they want him to sit down and try to relax while they make sure he's not slowly being poisoned or something. 

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(Leareth really wants to be in his library right now, with paper and access to records, so he can start checking his current reasoning against some kind of more objective outside source. Failing that, though, he'll reach out through his shielding with Thoughtsensing and hold a Mindspeech link open with Nayoki, so she can keep him up to date on whatever happens next.)

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Nayoki finishes. 

:Tell me if that resolved everything: she says once she's done, and the room has snapped back to its normal angles. :Do you want a moment before I explain some basics?: 

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:Thank you, but I expect I will be able to manage. Please, continue:

(And he listens, balancing the possibility that this is a story designed to manipulate him with the possibility that this is a story spun out of his mind with the possibility that this is genuinely real.)

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Actually, she's not totally sure how to approach this? 

:Leareth?: she tries. 

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:Here: His mindvoice sounds a little more normal, though it could just be the tight shielding blocking overtones. 

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:How open do you want me to be, exactly? If we do not explain that you are immortal, or - the situation with the gods - then the rest will not make sense, and he is going to notice and draw conclusions from that. He is - very good at drawing conclusions from minimal input, I think it may be some sort of Gift or equivalent. But–: 

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Leareth interrupts. :Obviously you should tell him! Tell him–: 

- and then, internally, he stumbles over the next part, which is 'tell him the basic overview of our plan', because now he's thinking about the basic overview of his plan and for some reason this is setting off quite a lot of internal screaming. 

 

:....Never mind: he manages. :Tell him the basics. Use your judgement: 

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..........Well. That's kind of concerning again, and Nayoki is suddenly unsure if her judgement should be 'don't tell him anything, leave him with some food and water and go figure out what's wrong with Leareth.' 

But Leareth isn't wrong, that contact with another world - which really seems like the only explanation at this point - is incredibly important, and first impressions with their potential ally matter. 

Nayoki takes a deep breath. :So. Explanation. ...You are currently in a secure facility in the northern tundra region, which in our world is not claimed by any country or any gods. - We have gods here, I am not sure if your world has those. Ours are sort of terrible and not very possible to cooperate with. I work for a man who calls himself Leareth - he is the one who was testing an experimental Gate and accidentally landed in your world and managed to take you back with him–: 

She cuts off, because now that she's considering it, that's exactly the kind of bizarre coincidence, either implausibly lucky or unlucky depending on how this ends up going, that she tends to blame on a particular set of actors. That's unnerving. 

:- Sorry. I am now thinking about the unlikelihood of that series of events. Our gods like to operate via coincidences, but I am not sure if I expect Them to have been able to see your world, if They are not operating there, and you would have noticed if They were. Have you?: 

And she reads his mind and watches with all of her Sight for his reaction. 

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His reaction is frank confusion.

Gods are believed to exist, by some, but don't. If this is a medieval society (a complex package of ideas he has bundled together), which is what the visible technology level suggests, then quite a lot of people will believe in gods, but she actually thinks they exist, in a manner such that she predicts they will take clear actions, and is also opposed to them. (Very few people believe in powerful entities that dominate their every action and cannot effectively be resisted and don't submit to them; it's a flaw in humanity, a tendency to bend at the knees.) So her words are some evidence towards her world having gods, always conditional on it being real, but gods are such a bizarre thing for a world to have -

"Testing an experimental Gate and accidentally landed in your world" is a very common sort of Idealist origin story (an extremely complex concept that is hard to read, since it's down to a single word, but living-story-person might be the best approximation), but managed to take you back with him is not in the slightest, and he is back in extremely-implausible-hypothesis-land. He knows Voidwrath considers himself a god, and various people have gone around claiming that they are living gods who ought to be treated as such, but they're all delusional megalomaniacs (an ironic tinge to his thoughts; he knows a great many people would call him a delusional megalomaniac.) Overall this is additional complexity that slightly penalizes all his theories, which failed to predict it, but weights are shifting - 

:Our world has the concept of gods, but not any evidence that they are real.: Yet.

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….She likes this man. She suspects Leareth would too. Well. Normal, functional Leareth. Current Leareth clearly likes him too, but that seems less relevant and more concerning. 

She is now even more sure that he’s from another world, because - well, the gods are subtle, but not that subtle, and his mysterious not-Gift would be especially useful for catching onto Their nudges. Probably a lot faster than Leareth did, even. 

:Our world has gods that sometimes possess people directly, or send blatant prophetic visions, or - set people on fire, occasionally. They also seem to dislike progress, in magic or non-magical technology. Leareth is opposed to this. I work for him because I also disapprove:

Reactions?

 

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This is very greatly increasing the odds that this world is a hallucinatory trap designed to personally appeal to him. In the event that he mysteriously gets a Gate home before he wakes up, he needs to carry out no plans he wants to implement in the real world, not that any of those would be relevant if they could just go to another world with medieval technology and gods that are afraid of science.

... He'll need to consider that he's still in a hallucination if he does wake up, but he can think of a number of tests that he could run that would reduce the odds significantly, as long as the dream-world isn't perfectly faked. But he certainly shouldn't carry out the Legacy Forge operation exactly as he has it planned, not if they might be reading his mind.

:I do not particularly feel that anyone has the right to stop me from inventing whatever technology I please, no,: he agrees. :Brief estimation of your current level - wheel, writing, smelting bronze, smelting iron, aqueducts, printing press, intercontinental ships, steel manufacture, steam engines, lighter-than-air aircraft, electricity, the telegraph, heavier-than-air aircraft, horseless wagons, steel ships, mechanical computers, electronic computers...: He's thinking of the things as he names them, and in the back of his mind, subverbally, there is the fact that this is a test to see just how much information she's getting from him.

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Interesting.

It’s starting to look like even more of a blatant coincidence that this man in particular was the one Leareth accidentally kidnapped, but - it’s not obviously an unfriendly coincidence? 

Well. Aside from the part where something is badly wrong with Leareth, something she doesn’t understand. 

Still, on the surface, this seems like a person Leareth could work with. And maybe more relevantly, someone she can imagine working with.

(Nayoki makes a couple of additional mental notes - and then, since the mental notes are kind of piling up now, she reaches out with a Mindtouch to her usual clerk. Who picks up immediately, because the whole facility is on high alert by now, and Nayoki can pass on everything she has so far, plus the ‘Legacy Forge operation’ concept - she’s going to be keeping a close lookout for anything more on that. And whatever he means by ‘medieval’ technology, because it seems like he’s thinking of it as - a standard stage that civilizations pass through? Which he can categorize because it’s in his world’s past, much less advanced than their current state…)

She’s following his list of technologies fine until half a dozen items in, and then starts mentally stumbling a little on the framing, or emphasis, being odd or unfamiliar. And it gets worse from there. The last couple, she can't make sense of at all - though she vaguely suspects Leareth would recognize something in the concept…

:We have wheels and writing and smelting of - various metals: she starts. She's unsure how much the purely mental concepts of different metals map to the words she knows, though she definitely has guesses. :We know about aqueducts and printing presses, though they are not widespread at this point: It's not the time to get into the turbulent history of the Eastern Empire. :Intercontinental ships have existed before, but are not currently a priority. We - make some specialized items from steel, usually with mage-work, but I am not sure if that is what you mean?: 

She takes a deep breath.

:I am not sure what you mean by 'steam engines': True, ish, she can get more of the concept from his thoughts, but she doesn't recognize it – though again, Leareth might. :There is a created species who can fly using native magic, but we do not have any non-magical flight technology and it is mostly intractable even for mages. ...I am sorry, can you repeat the last few, I lost track:

(Presumably her clerk took down notes and would remember, but she's not making an effort to show off the powers of Mindspeech right now, and she genuinely doesn't recall what came next.) 

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:That is an answer to my question, as it happens. The list was 'electricity, the telegraph, heavier-than-air aircraft, horseless wagons, steel ships, mechanical computers, and electronic computers', but If they are unfamiliar to you that tells me approximately what things you have discovered, and full explanations of how they function would take longer.:

The printing press isn't widespread? Why not? Is it a recent invention or is there a story there? 'The gods', I'd they're opposed to science, but...

(He's also thinking about how this has implications about various social environments; presumably most of the population is farmers, unless magic substitutes effectively there... He should ask about magic...)

:May I ask how this magic and mage-work you have mentioned function? It can create species?:

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:- Well, I cannot make any sense of the last two concepts: It's coming across as something like 'entities that think, but without souls, and made of metal or of levinbolts' and that sounds like one of the more baffling concepts she's ever heard. :And I cannot see the benefit of making ships out of steel, it does not float– ...anyway. Leareth knows far more than or anyone else alive about the peak state of our world's technology, or knowledge of lost technologies, because -: this really won't be credible if she doesn't give the real reason, and she has implicit signoff from Leareth and is desperately curious about his reaction, :- because he is immortal: 

- and there was another question there, wasn't there, but she's going to wait a moment to see the response to the first bit. 

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It isn't surprising, computers are complicated. And his response to her statement about ships is a brief flash of amusement...

... Leareth is immortal. Immortality is on his to-do list. If he knows more than anyone else alive and she phrased it as "because he is immortal" instead of "because he is older than anyone else" there must be very few immortals. So it can't just be standard.

: Fascinating. Immortality has occurred but is not common, in my world.:

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:It is uncommon here as well. ...Anyway. Mage-gift is one of a number of known Gifts - I am not sure if they work the same in your world, here Gifts are inherited, but not entirely predictably. Mage-gift is the most - general, broadly applicable - but also takes the most skill to use effectively. I think that no one currently alive can create species except for Leareth. Other than that, mage-gift can replicate most of the other Gifts - seeing at a distance, communication at a distance, showing illusionary images, starting fires, moving objects, shielding buildings or people - also various kinds of detection-ward for danger, or particular kinds of magic...: 

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He thinks this is very interesting! He's quite confident this does not map to anything he understands, but he needs to learn more insofar as this is at all real.

:We do not; some people possess superpowers, but though the potential is hereditary -: he's thinking along strict Mendelian lines, not the word but the concept of getting one gene of a pair from your mother at random and one from your father and getting different results depending on whether they match, and if they do, which they are  :- what form it takes is largely random.: Dependant on the user's mind, on the circumstances, and on factors he does not understand.

... He wonders what species Leareth designed. He wonders why no one designed a Humanity Mark II, with better eyes and longer lifespans and pain caps and a higher IQ. He thinks you can learn a great deal, from what species someone would design if they could.

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Nayoki isn't actually sure why Leareth didn't design a better human! She knows very little about his species-design work aside from the fact that he knows a lot about it and has done it before, and the details are classified even from her. She is instinctively not curious about it, out of habit (and also she has a compulsion in place for that sort of issue, but the habit is doing most of the work right now.)

That's an incredibly weird way for Gifts to work! Nayoki isn't sure what to make of it. 

:Our Gifts have a more reliable inheritance pattern in potential, although not perfectly predictable. Potential Gifts do not always awaken - some but not others might awaken, for a given child, the overall tendency correlates with magical exposure - but they can be detected either way. We do have occasional Wild Gifts that do not fit the usual system, but other than mage-gift, the common ones are - Mindspeech, Empathy, Farsight, Foresight, Fetching, Firestarting, Bardic, Healing...: 

Nayoki goes through everything, and tries deliberately to push across as much concept-context as she can along with the words. 

She leaves out Mindhealing, though. 

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The Tyrant will listen to her talking about how local superpowers work basically forever! This will involve instinctively thinking about how they could be useful to solve problems back at home or how they are obviated by other problems; Mindspeech is a technological advantage on encrypted radio waves, Empathy would be stupendously useful because mental powers are rare, Farsight can be replaced by a camera, Fetching is standard TK except also teleportation?, Firestarting is obvious, Bardic is strange and complicated - maybe a Warper power? - and healing would be useful but is probably not useful enough to make up for the tech level.

He will, however, disarm while he does it, since he did make the offer; the armor he's wearing does some complicated mechanical operations to open up, and then he can take a step out of it.

He appears to be male, of broadly Valdemaran ethnicity, in his forties or fifties, and in quite good physical shape. His clothes look about as alien as his armor, though, and there's a number of metal and ?something resembling metal? gadgets in his pockets and on his belt that he has not thought of the uses of at all while he was here.

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Huh. Nayoki doesn't ask about the gadgets, though she's rather curious and keeps an eye out for any incidental thoughts. Watching the armor come off is especially interesting, and she's already planning to ask about it once she finishes going through the list of Gifts. 

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