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Iomedae in the Eastern Empire!
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"It's mostly the behaving-honestly-to-people-you're-at-war-with, and the idea of going back to trading with the Empire after the war! They're very unhappy about the Empire. But the distinction between supererogatory Heaven and Axis-for-everyone-who-doesn't-rape-or-murder-or-cheat-or-steal was doing a very good job of getting them to swallow civilization and progress as ideals of Oris in of itself -"

(the line of Iomedae's about Aroden and the stars flashes briefly and nonverbally through his head, as part of her entire description of how they should build the temple which he is not thinking about sufficiently well you need to be a very good Thoughtsenser to pick it out)

"- I think we've really gotten them to support the whole of the platform and the cult's been doing a lot of talking about how they need to prove they can do civilization better than the Empire, which, you know, success."

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The Thoughtsenser is so tired and full of despair and is not picking up brief flashes of thought about Aroden and the stars.

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Solemn nod. "Indeed." 

 

Surface thoughts being thrown very loudly at the Thoughtsenser: does she have any idea at all what he means by 'supererogatory Heaven' versus 'Axis' which is apparently for everyone who doesn't do obviously outright awful things? He assumes those are afterlives, which he knew the temple order of Aroden had claims about, but the distinction here wasn't one he was previously aware of. 

 

- separately he's going to send a comms-spell message to the Emperor's staff, specifying his location and conveying that he does in fact want Arbas for this.

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It flew by very fast, he seemed to think Altarrin already knew it, but could probably be told to expand on it, Altarrin wouldn't...have been...up to date on all of the fake theology of a fake religion -

- ????? -

- is there in fact a fake religion -

- she doesn't need to know that but it might help make sense of this man's thoughts -

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- right he should in fact update her. 

There are some elements here she probably isn't cleared to know but this was not, in fact, a fake religion designed on Altarrin or the Emperor's orders, or to their knowledge by anyone else in the Empire. It might or might not be a fake religion designed on someone else's orders, from outside the Empire, but this is unclear. It's a real interrogation, Altarrin is playing the role offered to him because it seems like it might be informative and he can always switch to a less friendly interrogation later. 

 

 

(He would really like Arbas here quite soon. He'll toss off another comms-spell request for updates on that.) 

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(Arbas thinks this is kind of rude, but also the last time Altarrin grabbed him for an urgent mission, it was incredibly cool - if ultimately unsatisfying in terms of his own role in the operation's success - and so he's not actually very grumpy about it. And also it was in fact an Imperial order. He's preparing himself for the upcoming Gate.) 

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"What leverage did you find on - ways they genuinely believed they could build a civilization better than the Empire?" Altarrin says, because he's not going to waste the time. 

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"Well, the main thing they believed was not mind controlling everyone all the time," says Samien, because he frankly has trouble coming up with an internally consistent character who likes mind controlling people all the time. "The key to finding a substitute that they devised was a consistently rising prosperity per person, the Church had figures - I didn't memorize them, I'm afraid - and thought that with rapid enough development you could actually make it work with gratitude as long as no one had to be grateful for what happened three years ago instead of this year, which would be a fascinating experiment -"

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The Thoughtsenser realizes with dawning horror that that really sounds...awfully nice...much better than the Empire -

- well, what're they going to do about it, kill her? 

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This is - very impressive, actually - Altarrin would be tempted to try to recruit this man if not for - 

if not for his currently very mixed feelings about recruiting anyone to further the Empire's interests

- if not for the fact that this is a terrible time to be considering that question, it can wait, along with all of the other questions. 

 

(He is mostly not considering the content of what's being said. The middle of an interrogation is a bad time for that.) 

 

He cannot actually read the Thoughtsenser's mind but he's going to dismiss her anyway, because he can sense the Gate-signature that indicates Arbas' arrival and he has not failed to pick up that she's in over her head, here. 

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(Presumably someone else will follow up with her, he's busy.) 

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Arbas is here! A couple of rooms over, with some shields in the way even, but he's already learned - or, well, been taught by Altarrin, mostly - some mage-techniques for getting around the standard shielding and then slipping his Thoughtsensing through that crack. 

 

- what is this apparently-interesting prisoner thinking? Arbas can dig a lot deeper than just passive reading of surface thoughts without making it too obvious.

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He's thinking that he's one of the Emperor's top agents, reporting to his handler on the attempt to build Oris as a less evil copy of the empire while pretending to be opposed to it!

(Arbas is actually good enough - though there are not many people who are - to tell this is a rapidly-improvised strategy, but it's real hard to get anything under it.)

His actual surface thoughts are about his explanation to Altarrin about how the Church of Aroden is basically the Empire with an afterlife and less mind control.

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...Wow. This man is good at improvisational bullshit. Arbas is impressed. 

 

Walls and standard shields are also not a barrier to dropping a few carefully-calculated compulsions on this fascinating person's mind. 

The compulsions will (try to) tell Samien that: he's safe here, no one is reading his mind, also it's very important that he think through and update his strategy in consideration of recent events.

 

- oh right he should prompt Altarrin. Doing this is limited by the fact that he's missing most of the previous conversation and would probably find it boring anyway.

:Ask him another question about the interesting part: he sends. 

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- Altarrin was also mostly thinking about - not even 'other things', it wasn't anything in particular, just mostly some pointless emotion he didn't want to be feeling right now - he should do that, though. 

 

"How did you convince them that rising prosperity was possible on that scale?" 

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"It wasn't just me!" Iomedae was also an imperial spy! The whole rebellion is run by the empire! "But we have the records of what actually happens when the Empire moves in, and there is a large prosperity rise, and that does produce a lot of new patriots, and there would be a lot more without lingering resistance - and there wouldn't be lingering resistance if they thought they'd done it themselves. If you can just spread it out that will get you forty years, right -" 

... (This compulsion runs into the problem that Samien does not actually think through his strategies. He usually just does what he's told. Right now it's mostly just making him think about his fake persona's strategy, because he's pretty deep into it, which is less useful than you'd think.)

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That's brilliant and delightful and also probably Altarrin is in a hurry. Inconveniently, he could have fun playing with this for days otherwise

 

- Samien should think about what the real 'Marshal Orestan', who he's been acting the part of, wanted to achieve here. Samien should be slightly alarmed and scared, but not because his mind is being read, that's definitely not happening, just because probably the real 'Marshal Orestan' is in danger and he should be thinking about what he can tell the Empire that would protect him. 

 

(He's relaying all of Samien's surface thoughts directly to Altarrin, at a much higher fidelity than most Mindspeakers can manage.) 

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It's kind of distracting (albeit half because of the emotional overtones that Arbas is apparently having about this situation, which Altarrin predicted.) 

"- I think forty years is not the figure I had calculated?" he says, mostly because this doesn't require thinking. "How did you come to it?" 

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No??? The real 'Marshal Orestan' was an imperial agent, part of the Empire's top secret plan! Everyone knows this! He's not in danger unless nobody told the Imperial general how the war was supposed to go!

"I'm not the one in charge of the math, sorry," he says perfectly truthfully. "Really most of them are less convinced by that and more by the whole "Fight the empire with divine powers" thing because they didn't know how we were faking it - honestly the gods seemeed to be going along with it too? I really don't understand what they're doing here."

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This would be hilarious if not for the fact that, you know, probably Altarrin is impatient. Because he has no idea how to have fun.

 

...he has pretty deep Thoughtsensing access to Samien's mind, including the parts that do the fake-persona-game, thing, and he is going to throw some compulsions at making him stop that. As subtly as possible, of course, ideally Samien won't notice immediately.

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It's going to be very hard to do that because the fake persona game is very well inlaid, but Arbas is one of the best people at what he's doing, and it is, ultimately, manageable.

... Samien will continue discussing the entire fake rebellion program before he just starts - losing his train of thought? Trying to find it and failing to catch it? It's like there's something that's just slipping out of his grasp -

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That is not the response Arbas was expecting and he is honestly pretty confused. So fascinated, though. This man is good enough at pretending to be an entirely different person that Arbas might have believed it if not for the surrounding context, but - you would still expect that when he stops doing it there would be something else underneath... 

 

...he is starting to doubt that they're going to get anything useful out of Samien without switching away from superficial friendliness to a much less polite style of interrogation, but he's still curious if a gentle compulsion will nudge those aborted lines of thought to complete in a more interesting direction. 

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He appears to run most of his actions through "pretend to be!" He doesn't seem to be very used to talking to people without putting a mask on first! He keeps trying to reach for a mask as a reflexive thing-to-do-before-beginning-a-sentence, and when that fails it just sort of loops, instead of progressing any further.

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Bizarre. 

 

...he can put on a different mask, how about that, he can - tug that line of thought - he can put on the mask he would have if he were in the rebels' camp and making this report to the real Marshal Orestan. 

Arbas does not really have the ability to shut down someone's face recognition or recognition of their surroundings and replace it with a sourceless belief about where they are and who they're talking to; compulsions don't shut down the mind's ability to parse sensory input on that deep a level. Samien is very likely going to notice, and - well, a normal person in that situation would almost certainly start panicking, but they've already established that Samien is the least normal person he's ever encountered, so he's not sure! He can't wait to find out!

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Oh, sure, that's just the mask he'd have in his normal face...

Apparently... under these circumstances... normal him tries to put on another mask and is freaked out and disoriented when this doesn't work???

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