That is still fairly abstract, Altarrin thinks, and might not be very helpful to Ramona for guessing what specific sort of thing Caris means. 

"The assassination attempt against me came up earlier," he says, in a normal tone of voice. (His compulsions have no objection at all to talking about ways the Velgarth gods are very difficult to work around.) "What may not have been clear is that - this is not a case where a specific person or group of people wanted me dead, and planned accordingly. That would probably have failed, I am difficult to kill." 

It's actually a pretty complicated sequence of events; he spends fifteen seconds just thinking through what order to tell it in. 

"The broad strokes are that I had gone to investigate a suspicious string of bizarre sabotage incidents at the spellsilver mine we had recently opened in a northern province - Caris needs spellsilver for making magic items, so it was quite high stakes to me. I went north in person to investigate; I suspected that worshippers of Vkandis, one of the gods who has a country nearby, were involved. I had the mine workers evacuate and stay in their quarters, detained several of them for questioning, and went down into the mine to look at the scene myself. ...It turned out that my temporary replacement clerk happened to be more corrupt than my usual staff, and accepted a bribe from a Healer on-site to smuggle one of the detained workers out, who happened to be her brother. To create a diversion and let him get away cleanly, she somehow convinced the second detained worker to kill the third for extra blood-power, and go down into the mine to Final Strike - a type of suicide attack mages can perform to create a large explosion. I am not sure they even intended to kill me. It should not ordinarily have even injured me badly, just created a significant distraction and occupied us until her brother was out of range. What actually happened is that there was, coincidentally, also a pocket of bad air undetectable to mage-sight, so I was moderately impaired, and separately there was a pocket of highly flammable gas, which led to a far larger explosion than they could possibly have anticipated. I still made it out, but it was more of a close call than it had any right to be, and that was not planned by any of the individuals involved." 

"So you had plans -- to set up spellsilver mining. And the saboteurs had plans... to stop you. And their plans should not have been good enough, because you're so hard to kill, but their plans nearly worked anyway, because the gods were nudging things in that direction. Did I understand you correctly?"

"I have no reason to think the saboteurs were aiming to kill me. To damage the Empire, sure, but it was not predictable from their point of view that I would come in person at all. They may not even have known who I am, the province in question is very remote from the capital. And the the actual attack on me was barely even related to the earlier sabotage." 

"Oh, so it wasn't even the gods putting their fingers on the scale to favor the saboteurs' plans over yours. This was an entirely different outcome, that apparently only the gods wanted? Is that closer?"

"That was my interpretation, yes." 

"Gosh, I can't decide if I should be asking you a whole bunch more about the gods now, but I'm afraid of getting too far afield. I should probably be focusing on things that the four of us have any hope of shifting anytime in the next few hours, days, or weeks."

"Unless... do I need to understand the gods before I can make a plan for how this therapy works? Like, if the gods don't want you to resolve your issues with each other, does that mean we need a clever ten-year plan to do it?"

This was absolutely not covered in the class about treatment planning in graduate school.

"Should be fine, they have few avenues to intervene here because this is an uninhabited area. In the long run we might want to switch to a location on your planet but Bastran'd have to trust me more."

Nod. "I think the gods may have tried something like that with Caris and Bastran, arranging for Bastran to learn certain information in the right - or wrong, from our perspective - order, such that he assumed Caris was untrustworthy. But that plan did not actually work, and it would be much harder to nudge from our current position." 

"Okay, I just can't resist, even though it probably doesn't matter to the therapy... why are the gods against you? I'm not even sure which 'you' I'm talking about. All three of you?"

"I assume They are against me in particular because I was involved in the Cataclysm - I find it hard to blame Them - and then kept popping up again, which must have been alarming. But - more generally, my understanding is that They see the world through Foresight, prophecy, and find anything unpredictable alarming because it makes it difficult to see and plan. Advancing technology is unpredictable, and They seem consistently against that, except in the Empire which is predictable anyway because everyone is mind-controlled. ...Caris, I think They find alarming because he is from another world with magic that does not exist in Velgarth, and is inherently very noisy. Bastran, I am not sure They actually object to. His reign as Emperor has not been unduly unlucky so far." 

"I could probably have stayed out of trouble with the gods if I went back to being very small and unambitious and uninteresting but then I'd die when I got old, so."

"All right. I'm going to let this god stuff go for now, and come back for it if I need to. Just one more question that I can think of while Bastran is still out of the room."

"Can you give me a complete list of all of the compulsions on each one of you? Or is that hard to do for some reason?"

Ramona is actually kind of thrilled to be able to ask this question. Normally people don't know what they're not letting themselves consider. Of course, these clients might have the usual kind of lack-of-introspection psychological problems too, but it's sort of refreshing to work with artificial psychological obstacles that are, presumably, fairly clean around the edges and articulable.

"I have a long list blocking me from conquering the Empire or magically manipulating Bastran or the people who work for him but none affecting my motivations or thought processes. - I argued for this. I really didn't expect Bastran to listen but he did."

Altarrin's current compulsions, in order, are:

- To obey direct Imperial orders from a lawful superior. Bastran counts. Rather few others in the Empire would. This one is inactive and has no effect on his thinking or motivation unless he's in fact receiving an Imperial order. 

- Not to alter his compulsions, request their alteration, or make indirect plans to have them altered. 

- To serve the Empire. 

- To serve the Emperor. 

- A list of (non-motivation-affecting) specific blocks against sabotage, theft of Imperial resources, plotting to assassinate fellow officers, etc etc etc. 

Bastran only has a single compulsion, "to serve the Empire." It's somewhat differently set up than Altarrin's corresponding compulsion, but he's not sure he can describe the difference in a way that would be meaningful to Ramona, and in any case the precise effects on, and how they differ for Altarrin, are going to depend more on how Bastran conceptualizes it and relates to it differently than on the actual magical differences. 

"So I find I'm still confused, because none of those seem to be about what Altarrin or Bastran are allowed to think. Can you help me understand that part?"

"The compulsion to serve the Empire is motivation-affecting. I can - mostly step around this - but I think for Bastran, it makes it very difficult to consider whether the Empire is...not worth serving."

And the compulsion not to plan even indirectly to modify his other compulsions is very motivation and thought-affecting, and is the main thing making this conversation difficult. Altarrin isn't going to bring that up explicitly; he might be able to wrangle it, but it would hurt. 

"I'm going to trace back how we got here."

"1. Caris said, among the concerns he believes others have about him, that he thinks Bastran doesn't want Caris to take Altarrin away."

"2. When I checked with Bastran, he said that wasn't quite it, but that he thinks Altarrin hates the Empire now, and that Caris had something to do with that. And that Altarrin wouldn't want to leave the capital if it weren't for that change of heart."

"3. Altarrin clarified that Caris cast a Wisdom-enhancing spell on him, and so enhanced, he noticed that the Empire was stuck, and that he hadn't been able to think clearly about it because of his compulsions. I'll note here that I'm not actually sure which compulsion of Altarrin's got in the way here, but something did."

"4. Bastran couldn't actually process what Altarrin said, because of his compulsion to serve the Empire. To notice that there is anything seriously wrong with the Empire might generate a thought that the Empire is not worth serving, and that would be in conflict with 'serve the Empire.'"

"Then I started poking into whether it might make sense to remove these compulsions. We quickly established that we can't remove them permanently, because that would likely result in Bastran being deposed as Emperor and probably killed. We could potentially remove them temporarily, just while we're in this tower. One downside to that is that evidently it was 'bad' for Altarrin when he had to get his compulsions put back on again. I haven't heard much yet about that badness, and I'll need to if we're seriously considering doing the same to Bastran."

"I also need to consider questions of whether I need Bastran's consent... or meta-consent... or something. Or if I can just decide to do it for 'his own good.' I would need to be very very sure it was actually for his benefit."

"But even ahead of all that I have to ask..."

"To what end? What could we even hope to accomplish?"

"Let's say we took off Bastran's compulsions so everyone here could think clearly and hear each other and communicate."

"Let's say that worked, and now Bastran understood what Altarrin was saying."

"What then? Would that actually get us anywhere? And would we have any gains we'd get to keep when the compulsions were back on?"

"What do you two think?"

If, in fact, Altarrin can think about this at all. Which Ramona is not entirely sure he can, what with it being a proposal about altering compulsions. She is keeping open the possibility that Altarrin's compulsions should also be removed but she knows he can't think about that, so.

"- if he was - on our side but under constraints - that seems different from him just not caring about anything that actually matters to us even when he's not forced to?"

This is a moderately difficult conversation to have. Altarrin is going to pretend they're talking about the antimagic field plan, where it's not like the compulsion are even off, just temporarily suppressed. 

"I think there are gains we would keep even if Bastran needed to return to the Empire with the compulsion in place." 

Pause. 

"...The compulsion Bastran is under is - one that lands differently depending on how he relates to it. I think he could - substantially change how he relates to it, in a session of talking about it. The compulsion to serve the Empire is...not the one I found particularly difficult to have back in place. Since there are many ways of serving the Empire. In a sense, directly fighting the gods on the Empire's behalf would be very patriotic." 

"Please tell me everything you can think of that could go wrong with a temporary removal of Bastran's compulsions. And I mean everything. No matter how unlikely. I'll think about it too."

"He's mad and decides to try to kill us. - he can't, in an antimagic field. The antimagic field triggers some other precaution his security persuaded him to place against me since it's an obvious thing I'd try if I were trying to kill him. He gets really mad and orders us executed. Antimagic fields are actually one of those spells that fail one time in a hundred in a spectacular way and I just never heard about it because at home there was no one pushing for hostile coincidence. He has an emotional breakdown. There's some way that suppressing his spells looks to his security like him being murdered and they come in to kill us. Some of us are mistaken about which compulsions we're under."

Altarrin also considers this for a suitably long interval. 

"I am not particularly worried about security precautions, I think? We could probably risk asking him if he set up anything with his security team, but I doubt it. The shielding on the tower itself already makes it more or less impossible for magical signals to get through, and I would notice if he were wearing an item designed to trigger an alarm in response to antimagic fields."

Pause. "I am definitely worried it might cause various kinds of emotional distress. It would be risky to warn him first, and if we do not warn him, he might find that upsetting? It - might make it hard for him to model his future feelings on something once the compulsion is affecting him again. It might make him - less motivated to solve problems in general, since I suspect he has a lot of his motivation in general built on it?" He shakes his head slightly. "I think it is not very likely he would have an emotional breakdown that we cannot figure out how to handle, or that would persist after he leaves the antimagic field." 

"Here's what I came up with. Mine are less informed by reality than yours."

"1. It's painful to go back under compulsions.
2. The compulsions won't go back on, somehow.
3. Bastran doesn't want the compulsions back on, and we end up having to do that against his will.
4. Bastran refuses to continue to serve as Emperor. (I have no idea what the sequelae to that would be!)
5. Bastran loses his mind because it's been so shaped around the compulsions that he's completely lost without them.
6. The gods don't like us doing such a high-variance thing and find a way to intervene, later if not while we're right in the middle of what we're doing."

"There is a lot of overlap in our lists, and some of mine might not even make any sense."