"I can continue today but don't want to assume you all want to hang around while I talk to each of you individually. I don't need to be back until evening on my world."

"I probably shouldn't plan on being away longer than I have to," Bastran says tightly. Hopefully it doesn't come off sounding like a childish excuse. 

"I'm worried we don't have time to be leisurely about everything. The gods will figure out how to drop an asteroid on me eventually." Oh, huh, English has a word for the general case of Earthfall, good for English. Or concerning for English. "But we don't have to do all the individual sessions today."

"Perhaps I should speak to Bastran next, then, so he can get on about his business."

Nod. "I do not mind waiting until after Bastran. And Caris lives here anyway." Altarrin gets up to leave the room. He doesn't smile at Bastran - it won't actually help - but he catches his eye and nods firmly to him. 

Caris will Dimension Door upstairs because he's too powerful to use his legs for anything. He'll give Bastran a hug first, though.

"Hi there. Thanks for making so much time for this today. I imagine it's not easy to clear your schedule when you have an entire Empire to run, and I do appreciate it. I'll try not to take up too much more of your time."

Eeep.

The hug does help. It just also makes it harder to keep the feelings in the BOX where they BELONG. Bastran looks sort of plaintively at the spot where Caris just vanished, and then squares his shoulders and makes himself actually look at Ramona. 

"It seemed important to Altarrin that we make time for it," he says. His voice comes out sounding more or less normal; he's distantly impressed with himself about that. "What did you want to ask me about?" 

"Well, first off, is there anything at all you want to say that's easier to say without the others around? I won't bring it back up with them without your permission."

"I. Um." Bastran feels like there's almost certainly something that would be easier to talk about without Caris and Altarrin right there? But he's not, in fact, managing to think of it. "I - don't think so? I'm not - I can speak freely with them." Really, 'not being able to speak freely' is the sort of problem that everyone who isn't the Emperor has. 

"That's okay, a lot of people don't particularly have anything to say, but I like to leave you an opportunity if you have anything like that!"

Ramona smiles and makes sure her shoulders are low and her belly is soft and that she's projecting as much calm as she can.

"In that case, I want to do a thought experiment with you. I want you to imagine that it's three years from now. That's kind of an arbitrary number, so feel free to pick another number if that makes more sense. And in this thought experiment, you are happy. Things are good. Not just in your relationships, but in every way. You like where you live, who you live with, how you get along with them. You like your work and feel successful at it. You enjoy time with friends. You have hobbies. You feel healthy and good in your body."

"For some people, this is easy to imagine, they have a lot of that or they're pretty close. For others, it's painful even to contemplate, because it feels like there's no possible path from here to there."

"Either way... please tell me, what would need to change to get you there?"

Ramona likes this question because sometimes people come in for relationship counseling and it turns out that what they really need is to fix their sleep apnea or their abusive boss or something, and if that gets fixed, their relationship gets a lot easier to work on. But clients don't think to mention any of that stuff to a relationship counselor.

Wow! Bastran really doesn't want to think about that hypothetical! At all! 

...He doesn't think it's about the compulsion. The rest of them have been talking around his loyalty compulsion - he's not blind, he can tell, sense the edges of that negative space - but considering what he needs to be unhappy isn't even ambiguously disloyal to the Empire. It's something Altarrin drilled into him - that he's not just allowed to have hobbies and friends and things that make him happy, but that remembering to find space for that is an important Emperor-ing skill. An Emperor needs that, to stay sane in this role for fifty or a hundred years. Altarrin might have advised him in those exact words. 

He really doesn't want to think about that conversation either, for some reason. Which is stupid because this is relationship therapy and he's supposed to be talking about his feelings, but apparently having the feelings is incompatible with talking about them. 

- well, feelings can go in box, and then he can talk about them? Sure. He can do that. 

"I think I would need more time to play music. Enough to get really good at it, it makes me sad that I'm not good at it. And I would need a relationship with someone I trust and feel comfortable with, and don't have to, I guess, put on a show with? With - lovers who weren't Caris - I think it always felt like I had to manage it. It would - be good, it would make me happy - if I had someone who I didn't have to do that with, and who - could treat me as an equal, I guess. ...And obviously I would need things not to be a disaster in the Empire, lots of things can be bad about - work - and make me unhappy." 

"Tell me more about music. What do you love about it? How long have you been a musician? What instruments do you play?"

There is only a 5% chance Ramona is actually going to directly use the information she gets as a response to this question. Mostly the benefit is indirect: she gets to know him as more of a real person, and not just a collection of neuroses, and in answering the question he'll relax a bit and feel more confident and more connected to Ramona. It's a rapport-builder.

But every now and then, it later turns out that there's some way to line up client A's long-dormant dream to... age cheese in the basement, or whatever... with client B's unspoken desire to quit their stressful job and open a farm stand. Every now and then, Ramona can cobble together little bits of seemingly irrelevant information to solve some problems. And that's Ramona's version of magic.

Possibly less magical than literally flying. But you take your joy where you find it.

You would think music would be easy to talk about. It's not - fraught - in any of the ways that any of the other things are; it's always been the only thing that was uncomplicated and good. But, maybe relatedly, it's - weirdly hard to say words about it? 

"...I wouldn't say I'm a musician, but - I learned my first instrument when I was four or five, I think?" A little wooden flute, which probably sounded awful and it's to his mother and sister's credit that they didn't take it away from him immediately. "I guess my best instrument now is the harp? It's - I don't know, I guess music is one of the only things that isn't about anything? It's not trying to - do things in the world, that might help people or hurt them if you get it wrong. It's - just for being beautiful."