Iomedae doesn't want to suggest anything that involves demanding things of Alfirin beyond 'access to factual information she cares to share'. Alfirin feels more coerced about being here than she does. She looks to Alfirin.

"...I'm sorry, I keep coming up with overly complicated schemes wherein we have a completely open conversation, write down the important conclusions, and then erase our memories. I'm not noticing anything that's not apparently worse than Iomedae's suggestion."

"We could try having an open conversation, not erasing our memories, but not acting on it outside an agreed upon set of conclusions. I think that is riskier than running things through Ramona, though."

"Agreed. Among other things I am less practiced at keeping commitments of that shape than you are and do not expect to gain a natural aptitude for it in eight years."

"I kind of like the memory erasing idea! I admit it wasn't on my list."

"Here's what I came up with. Some of them are probably not viable."

"One: maybe you secretly already kind of know the answer but you're reluctant to say it out loud. You could say it out loud anyway - very briefly - or if you both have an idea, you could write it on a slip of paper and hand it to me, and I could just compare those."

"Two: you could ask Shelyn! She told you to come here, so I know it's possible for you to communicate with her at all; maybe it's possible to ask for more details?"

"Three: you could ask anyone else that you trust and who knows you both, if such a person exists."

"Four: I have a technique I call a 'table of contents session' and I can describe that more in a second if it's of interest."

"I don't secretly know the answer. I guess I know Nefreti Clepati's inappropriate commentary and can share that if Alfirin wants to hear it, but I suspect Alfirin like me would prefer Nefreti Clepati be unable to accomplish things through inappropriate commentary so I've been acting like she didn't say it. 

Shelyn certainly knows and can be communicated with, but it is costly for the forces of Good to communicate with mortals and almost certainly not worth it. 

...Marit probably has an opinion. 

I would be interested in learning your techniques."

"I do not definitely secretly know the answer. I do indeed prefer Nefreti Clepati not be able to accomplish things through inappropriate commentary. Marit may have some useful insights and it seems worth asking him now that we've been forced to address this in the first place. I expect that this intervention is more expensive for Shelyn than other interventions that would cause us to talk to each other, so I expect your expertise will be useful and it seems worth trying any techniques that you think are applicable."

"I assume I should resist the temptation to ask who Nefreti Clepati is?" Ramona is rabidly curious to know about the inappropriate commentary, but restrains herself.

"Who is Marit and how is he connected to each of you?"

"And sure, I'll tell you about the 'table of contents' thing in just a moment."

"Marit is the other friend I have who is not dead yet. He's also very observant, appropriately paranoid, and an unusually talented swordmage, but the relevant part is that he's my friend and he's not dead. He's Iomedae's friend too, but she has more of those because she doesn't alienate people as much as I do."

"Marit serves under me in the Shining Crusade and knows us both well, and has for decades. Nefreti Clepati is a priestess of the god of knowledge and knows things she has no way to know, which is sometimes useful but I have no interest in it impinging on our personal lives and she hasn't offered me an outrageous bribe to put up with it."

'The other friend who isn't dead yet.' Ouch.

Ramona has to decide, and quickly, if she's going to respond to that. Often, taking an offhand comment about something that's actually quite painful and calling attention to it, dwelling there, can be a powerful move. It can help the client access some feelings they've been glossing over, a place they've become rigid and hard, and help them soften a bit.

Her instincts are telling her not to do that that here. She doesn't have quite enough rapport yet with Alfirin. She hasn't built a safe context for those kinds of feelings to bubble up, if in fact they're even in there.

She'll let it go, but she'll remember it in case she wants to come back to it later.

"All right, so we have two or maybe three options so far. The first idea was for both of you to go and write a long narrative for me -- or possibly meet with me individually -- and then I can figure out what the discrepancies are and help you focus just on those."

"The second idea is to ask Marit for help."

"And then there's the 'table of contents' thing, which is fairly similar to the first idea, but different in execution."

"Sometimes, after I've been working with a couple for a while, we arrive at a point where they've learned a bunch of emotion regulation and communication skills, but they have a backlog of old, painful topics that they're scared to address, because it always went so poorly every time they tried in the past."

"We want to clear out that old backlog, but we want to do it carefully, using all the new skills. We want to do it one topic at a time. And we usually don't want to start with the very hardest one."

"So we spend an entire session just -- making a list. We don't actually get into any of the topics. I have the clients take turns simply naming a topic, and saying maybe one or two neutral sentences about it, just enough so the other person knows what it means."

"We end up with a fairly cryptic list that has things on it like 'that time at the florist' and 'another baby?' and 'your habit of whistling' and 'that thing your mom said to me'."

"After that, we go through the whole list and each person rates each item, 1-10, for how explosive it seems, how dangerous it would be to talk about it. We sort the list from lowest score to highest."

"And then, usually, we start going through the list, one topic at a time, the next time we meet, starting with the easiest topic."

Ramona kind of wants to go on a tangent here about all the skills the clients are practicing just by making the list but refrains.

"This is not exactly the right technique for you -- but we might be able to do something kind of like it."

"You could list all the sticky spots, the candidate spots where there might be a misunderstanding, using just a few words for each. And then we could check them out, safest to most dangerous."

"Or -- if that's too risky, or seems too likely to miss something important -- we can try the other two ideas instead. What do you think?"

"That - sounds promising." It sounds like it might go badly, but they are here to do things that might go badly because it is what they'd want with full information, so one can't exactly steer by 'sounds like it might go badly'.

"It sounds riskier on net than us conveying things to you in private but likely to have other advantages. And it seems like the risk is largely...being more consciously aware of the things that we are avoiding talking about. That seems like an acceptable risk."

"All right. Shall we begin? We are looking for... snags... in your past, present, or future relationship. These might feel like messy events that were never fully resolved, concerns about the future, wishes that things were a different way... Who will be brave enough to go first?"

Phrased like that, it'll probably be Iomedae, right?

She'll glance at Alfirin first, but yes. 

"Hmmm. The breakup. Whether I wronged Alfirin by dating her in the first place, and if so why. Immortality. My ascension. What Future Alfirin got up to."

"My feelings about Iomedae. Iomedae's feelings about me. My possibly being evil or likely to become so. Iomedae or her church trying to kill me."

"All right, excellent! That's a lot to work with, thank you."

"Next we want to figure out which ones are least risky to talk about, and which we should put off discussing unless we have to."

"Is rating things on a scale from 1 to 10 a familiar mental motion for you, or should we find some other way to categorize things?"

"It seems intuitive enough. Is "one" the least risky or the most?"

"One is the least risky, ten is the most."

"With that scale in mind, how do you each rate each of these topics? Also fair game if more topics occur to you as we go along."

"Trying to use the whole scale, I think ... one, whether I wronged Alfirin by dating her. Two, Alfirin's feelings about me. Three, Alfirin being evil. Five, the breakup and my trying to kill Alfirin. Six, my feelings about Alfirin, my ascension. Eight, immortality. Ten, Future Alfirin."

Alfirin can provide her ratings, leaving some space around the edges for more extremely concerning or unconcerning conversational topics that she's not thinking of yet.

2 - Whether she was wronged by dating
3 - The breakup
5 - Feelings about each other
6 - Immortality
7 - Evil
7 - Iomedae or her church killing Alfirin.
8 - Iomedae's Ascension

...She does not know how to rate the activities of future Alfirin without giving away a good deal of information about the activities of future Alfirin, but they're going to actually talk about all these things eventually so there's not actually that much value in obfuscating it even though not obfuscating feels vaguely terrifying. She'll call it a seven.

And then Ramona can calculate a combined riskiness list. This technique sort of assumes that both clients' opinions should be weighted equally, and with enough cleverness you can devise situations where that will fail, but mostly it just works.

3: Did Iomedae wrong Alfirin by dating her?
7: Alfirin's feelings about Iomedae
8: The breakup
10: Alfirin being evil
11: Iomedae's feelings about Alfirin
12: Iomedae trying to kill Alfirin
14: Immortality
14: Iomedae's ascension
17: Future Alfirin