...The Thoughtsenser will pass this on. Leareth will be offered a padded chair to sit down, and delivered a hot sweetened drink, while an update is passed offsite. Someone will be over very soon. 

(They haven't noted any specific warning flags yet - Leareth is behaving characteristically enough, taking into account that he's expected to be very impaired, and it would be very very surprising if anyone could impersonate him to the point of reading his ciphers - but Nayoki will still likely want to see him in the shielded Work Room before they relocate somewhere more comfortable.) 

Leareth has no complaints. He's behind shields, which - it's helpful in a way that he still has enough uncertainty about the debrief to feel slightly tense, because otherwise he would be relaxed enough to really feel the exhaustion. As it is, it's catching up to him more than he would prefer. The room is a comfortable temperature - too warm with the coat, actually, he's going to shed that - and he can get some nutrition into himself without much effort and expect to feel less drained in a few minutes. 

...How is Karal reacting to all of this? 

There was a flash of anxiety at the Mindspeech, since he knows little about how it works and had no idea which one of them could or should reply, and a bit of embarrassment once Leareth dealt with it the obvious way.  The entire setup is extremely paranoid and impersonal and not particularly pleasant to go through, but it seems entirely characteristic of Leareth to have set it up that way, and he has no serious complaints.

In minor observations, since they have some time alone:  You're tired.  (So is he, but he doesn't really need to be able to think quickly.)  Do you have an idea how long this will take?

(Leareth supposes his reception here has been impersonal, but he's not...sure what else it could be? He isn't going to remember anyone who comes out to meet him, and so it would just be - odd, if they greeted him in a more familiar way.) 

I am tired, Leareth acknowledges. It - should either take a few minutes or a couple of candlemarks. Depending, mostly, on whether his trusted senior people are very concerned about him sharing a body with Karal, or were left with specific instructions that he doesn't remember giving about why this is a problem. ...And maybe somewhat on whether anything very eventful has been happening in Valdemar since his death, but even then a summarized update shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes. 

Anyway. If he hasn't forgotten something critical about bodysharing - if it's just the obvious, that it doesn't normally come up because normally the fight for control is instinctive and over in seconds, and that on the rare occasions it's an active choice, most people are...not Karal...and wouldn't find it workable - then it shouldn't take long. If the concerns only apply in the longer term, then it doesn't need to be a long conversation now, it can wait for a better time. Where it gets complicated will be if they do have immediate-term concerns, and he needs to make a judgment call on whether Karal - who he likes and appreciates, who seems not just 'possible to get along with' but like he could potentially be actively helpful as an ally who happens to share Leareth's head - is, in fact, unique enough that historical concerns might not apply. 

Would it be odd?  Of course there's going to be some oddness either way, but Karal doesn't see how treating Leareth like a stranger makes that better.  He'd feel reassured by a familiar greeting even from someone he didn't remember, although he does realize by now that they're very different people.  But probably not everyone in this organization is like Leareth - he thinks it would be difficult to assemble a group of loyal people all of whom were so... emotionally self-contained... and he doesn't know why anyone would aim for that.

He has no idea how unique he is - he's never felt particularly so, but all this is making him start to notice ways in which it might be true - but he wants to be the sort of person who can be helpful even in complicated and difficult circumstances, and managing it and having it noticed and appreciated fills him with warmth. 

A couple of candlemarks will obviously be worth it, if there's an urgent question of whether this is in fact a good thing.  It would be sad, if it turned out Leareth cannot have this, but... many sad things happen in the world all the time, and there's no reason this couldn't be one of them.  It'll still be good that they tried.

Leareth appreciates Karal. Now probably isn't a productive time to unpack all of it, but - that line of thought, right there, is so much of why Leareth feels like, whatever the reasons in the past why sharing a body didn't work, this time could be different. 

...And there indeed isn't going to be time to dwell on it, since someone is (after politely knocking) coming into the Work Room now. 

The woman who comes into the room is tall, with very very dark skin, almost black, and an incongruous puff of snow-white hair with a texture more like wool. (Less incongruous to Leareth, since it mostly conveys that she's a powerful Adept who has used a lot of node-energy.) Her eyes are node-bleached as well, to a luminous deep blue. 

"Leareth. ...I am Nayoki. Do you remember me?" She's looking at Leareth with the expression of someone who definitely knows him very well, is deeply relieved and glad to see him again, and has a lot more she wants to say than she's currently saying. 

There is a feeling of familiarity there, that wasn't present with the other man. No explicit memories - the handful of clear episodic memories that came across and aren't of the Foresight dream mostly didn't have people in them at all, or were of dangerous situations where he wasn't among allies - and he's not sure he would have successfully plucked her name out of the fog without her saying it, but it does feel like something sliding into place and fitting there.

He wouldn't be able to describe any particulars of their history, but he does have a vague sense that she - feels she owes him something - and that her loyalty is something he could put weight on. ...And that she's impressive and formidable. Maybe has a particularly rare Gift? He's not sure which Gift, though. 

He inclines his head. "Not - well. I am sorry." 

A flash of something in her eyes, that might be anger, but not directed at Leareth. "You are hardly the one who owes me an apology." A hesitation. "Are you - all right...?" 

She doesn't exactly look like someone stepping on the urge to give Leareth a hug - if there's an urge, it's more deeply buried than that - but she does look a bit like she's holding back from offering some kind of reassurance that she would want to if Leareth...remembered her... 

Leareth is mostly not paying attention to that aspect of the interaction. 

He frowns. "Somewhat complicated, I think. - I should know this, obviously, but are you a Thoughtsenser?" 

A brief flicker of something that might be dismay, quickly hidden. (It's not pleasant to be reminded how...damaged...Leareth is right now.) 

"Yes. And a Mindhealer. - mainly in a research capacity, I am not trained in conventional Mindhealing." 

Ohhhhhh. That does make some other pieces of mostly-buried memory fall back into place, and Leareth is now a lot more sure that he does, actually, know what Nayoki's role is in his organization, the details may still be hazy but the important part is there and he can fill himself back in from notes. (Everything is going to be like this for a while, he thinks; he usually remembers more than he initially thinks he does, just - without any handles to find it.) 

"Understood." He's really very tired. "...The complication is that I am sharing this body with its original occupant. The circumstances...made it convenient, initially, and I judged I had - time to think before making any longer term decisions. His name is Karal and he was fighting on the Karsite side in the war. It is a long story, I will not get into it now, but he was - not unwilling to leave. and we are - getting along well, so far. I know I do not normally do this, but I am not sure I recall all the reasons why not, so I wished to have a second opinion on - whether there is still a risk here even if he is someone we can work with in general." 

...And, basic explanation complete, Leareth is inclined to just take off the shield-talisman against Thoughtsensing and let Nayoki read both of their minds. It'll be faster. (It's also very obvious in Leareth's thoughts that he trusts Nayoki with this, there isn't any hesitation about baring his thoughts to her; it's equally obvious that there probably would have been a hesitation in general, and the shift is in something he's now managed to remember.) 

But he does want to ask. Karal, is that all right with you? It's not something he can avoid indefinitely, but Karal doesn't know Nayoki, and if he would prefer to introduce himself the normal way, in words, Leareth is willing to start with that. 

Of course.  He wouldn't refuse anyway - this is important, and he generally has little inclination to keep his mind secret - but he doesn't take long to form opinions on people, and unlike Leareth he has been paying attention to the emotional aspect of the brief conversation.  He likes Nayoki immediately - she cares about Leareth the way Karal cares about people, and Leareth trusts her, and Karal is so relieved to finally find someone like this in this strange place.  He wants her to know everything.

He feels for her, too.  Cannot help imagining himself in her place, all his loyalty reaching toward someone who no longer remembers his name, and it hurts.  But it's the all right sort of pain, dull and warm.  No wrong was done here.  He gets the impression that Leareth could've tried harder to remember her, but she wouldn't have wanted that, if he needed the memories for something else.  ...Or at least Karal wouldn't have, in her place.  He should make slightly fewer assumptions, no matter how relieved he is at Nayoki's obvious care.  And right now he should focus on the things that are important for her to see - his brief and surprisingly cooperative history with Leareth, his feelings and opinions about their relationship, his determination not to leave Leareth worse off for having been kind to him.

He'd like to talk to her at some point, the normal way, in words and in control of his face - but that can wait, and it'll be a better conversation if she knows him first.

That makes sense. Leareth is appreciative. ...And fairly sure Nayoki wouldn't have wanted Leareth to do anything differently, assuming he prioritized the way he did for sensible reasons - which he suspects he did, he has enough to get back to a healthy working relationship with Nayoki within a week or two, with her cooperation, and he notably doesn't have that for Vanyel - which he's not going to dwell on because of everything being complicated, but he does think it matters. Anyway. His prediction - based, to be clear, on an intuitive sense of Nayoki that he has despite not remembering how he formed it - is that Nayoki is upset, but mostly on Leareth's behalf, and would not consider herself the party harmed by his recent death, and would think her feelings are her own business that she's entirely competent to handle. (Leareth still finds that he appreciates Karal noticing that Nayoki's feelings probably exist.) 

He inclines his head to her. "For now, it seems probably simplest, and fastest, if you just read my - our - mind." 

Nayoki looks briefly a little surprised and nonplussed at Leareth's revelation, but she's not reacting with worry, at least not visibly. She nods. "All right." 

Leareth takes off the shield-talisman. 

Nayoki is probably better placed than he is to poke at where she thinks is important, but for the moment, he's focusing his attention on his memory of the conversation where he explained to Karal the basics of who he is and how he had come to be sharing Karal's head. It wasn't until many candlemarks in - initially, Karal was willing to work with Leareth with no explanation at all, albeit maybe because Leareth was willing to follow a plan that also accomplished what mattered most to him. It would have been actively harder for Leareth to make it off the battlefield without Karal's collaboration, and Karal's home was, if not necessarily definitely safe for Leareth, at least definitely safer than anywhere he could easily have reached on his own. 

And then he explained, and Karal - took it calmly, even though Leareth was himself too disoriented and exhausted to explain it particularly well, and even though it was really quite a threatening kind of explanation, that Leareth would by default have killed him on the battlefield and might still choose to kill him and had, at the very least, snatched his body and dragged him without consent into a very different life, one where he too is subject to the dangers Leareth is and the enemies Leareth has made. ...Leareth hasn't explained the full plan to him, and still isn't thinking about it in detail, but Karal knows that he considers himself opposed to the gods. He...should probably let Karal speak, or rather think, for himself on how he felt about that. He was at one point a follower of Vkandis but it seems - complicated - now. 

Karal is likewise entirely willing to have Nayoki look through his mind, or tell him what she wants - but he can start with the Sunlord, although he doesn't know that he has a good answer.  He is-- not sure to what extent he's still His follower, or even what that means in a world in which he suddenly has to think of gods as... entities one might oppose, or disagree with, instead of something like the land and weather, timeless and inevitable and simply there.

But on some level it doesn't matter very much.  He holds his word above everything else, and even though he hasn't given it here, he still considers himself bound to-- there's a vague bundle of concepts here, he's doing this on instinct rather than thinking through it in words, and trusting himself that the instinct is right-- but he wants to be the sort of person who can be trusted.  Not just trusted to keep his word or tell the truth, but to work together with when nobody knows what promises to ask for or what the truth is, to not take someone's kindness and use it to make things worse.  He will not, even if his god should command him.  (He might have thought differently, before the war, but... he cannot find it in himself to want to be the Sunlord's tool against his own deepest principles, not after how wrong everything has gone already.  And that, probably, is answer enough.  Perhaps it was enough that he was able to even consider the question - but it would've been difficult to spend a day with Leareth's thoughts in his mind and not absorb some of them.  If he is wrong in this, he will die, and atone afterward.)

Whether he agrees with Leareth's plan isn't really the right question either - he assumes it's something terrible and even harder to wrap his head around than opposing the gods in the first place, and of course he'll have to think about it at some point, but...  What matters is whether things will be better if he's here than if he isn't, and he thinks it's often possible to disagree with someone and still make the world better by trying to help them.  If they will change the world much more than you could on your own, and if you have enough in common, if you see something in them worth your friendship or your service - and he does, here.  People do better when they have more to work with, when they aren't alone, and he doesn't think even Leareth is an exception.

As for the body snatching - a soft mental shrug.  He was a soldier in a war of invasion.  If the Valdemarans had taken him prisoner, he would have accepted that as legitimate, and cooperated just the same, if he found honorable people on the other side.  He could, he supposes, blame Learath more, having not been at war with him, but... Leareth didn't act on a lawless whim or for the sake of harm - he's clearly fighting some larger war he feels bound to, no matter how strange, so Karal cannot in honesty resent him.  And doesn't feel like resenting him, even if he had no good reason not to.  It would go against his natural inclinations, and against his nascent but obvious affection for Leareth, and help nobody.

And of course Nayoki may still decide that something in their mind is going wrong and cannot be allowed to continue, no matter his intentions and opinions.  He trusts her to do that, having seen what she and Leareth are like together, and he's very glad she's here to make sure.

What a fascinating, extraordinary sort of person. 

Nayoki just watches, for a while, making sense of Karal's thoughts. He's a very unusual person, for sure, but not, actually, a confusing sort of person to exist. In some ways, he makes more sense to her than Leareth. (Asking whether he's more or less unusual than Leareth is...not very useful...she's fully aware that Leareth is himself extremely unusual.) 

...It's a little suspicious. Not that he exists, or was fighting on the Karsite border, but that - it must have been a fairly specific and unlikely series of events, that led to a mage-gift awakening late on a battlefield, and Leareth landing in his head under circumstances where he would find it particularly convenient not to immediately be alone there. 

It happened on Vkandis' territory. Another reason for suspicion. Leareth cannot possibly have failed to notice it, which - makes some sense of his obvious uncertainty. Leareth is not, in general, someone who tends to indecisiveness. He's needed to make critical judgement calls while newly incarnated before; he should in general be comfortable with it. He might have come back unusually disoriented, given the injuries he suffered, but...not enough to explain why he evidently seems inclined to significantly defer to her judgement. 

That is incredibly frustrating! The obvious theory is that it's a trap! Which Nayoki hates, because she likes Karal, already, and suspects she could grow to like him a lot more. She would ordinarily say that it could be - very good for Leareth - to spend a lifetime getting such a close-up view of Karal's thoughts. Particularly this lifetime, when everything is unusually high-stakes even for him. But, given the givens, now she has to ask how, exactly, this could be a plot to disrupt everything. Aughhhh. 

Leareth, at least, seems mostly like himself. Disoriented, badly impaired, even more exhausted than he wants to let on, but - given all of that, his thoughts are as characteristic of him as seems reasonable to expect. He was able to get himself here from Karse - and he's wearing his own artifacts, so he must have remembered enough to guess where to find a records cache. And Karal's reaction to him probably has a lot to do with who Karal is, but it can't be entirely that; Leareth must have been with it enough to explain himself in a way that made sense. 

She only has Leareth's descriptions to go on, in terms of comparing his state now to his past deaths and incarnations, but it at least seems like his condition before he died hasn't made things massively worse. 

...She's going to pull over a chair and sit down next to Leareth. (The Work Room isn't the coziest place to sit and talk, but Leareth seems fine with it and asking him to get up and move elsewhere would feel like more of an imposition.) 

"Karal," she says, smiling as naturally as she can manage. "I am pleased to meet you." And, more seriously, "- Leareth. I want to look at both of you with Mindhealing Sight, and - can you trade who is controlling the body? I would like to see how that looks. And - see your oldest memories, if that is all right." If it's not all right with him then she has some concerns, but it's still polite to ask. Most things aren't particularly, well, emotionally sensitive to Leareth. The Cataclysm is. 

...She has a feeling he hasn't showed that to Karal yet. She's pretty curious about how Karal would react. 

"Of course." Leareth's affect is, for the most part, enormously reassured. Nayoki isn't acting like he's forgotten something enormously concerning. "...Tell me when I should give Karal control." 

Nayoki opens her Mindhealing Sight wide. 

...That is incredibly bizarre. Probably Leareth's mind very recently in a new body would look bizarre anyway, but - wow. 

It looks like two loaves of breaded intertwined – something in between "two colors of dough" and "two entirely separate breads, overlapping in some impossible fourth dimension." 

Leareth's mind is more "in focus" right now, maybe because he's the one currently in control, but it's obvious to Nayoki's senses that, however dense and busy the center of his mind is, there...isn't that much...of Leareth. Not relative to how many of the body's entrenched pathways, the engrained physical and emotional habits of reaction, are Karal's. The exception is everything surrounding their mage-gift; the metaphorical crumb of Leareth's mind is tentative there, not yet fully comfortable or established, but the Karal dough-color doesn't have anything much at all, so it's not difficult for Leareth's mental habits to dominate. In terms of physical control, though, the pathways Leareth has are, though strong and thick, also oddly simple, blocky and almost clumsy. 

Nayoki licks her lips. "I would be curious if - Karal, can you take control without Leareth actively letting you? What happens if you try?" 

Now there's a question he has not at all been considering.  He's not even sure which one of them he's been trying to protect by not considering it.  But it would clarify some things, to have the answer...

And then there's an instant in which he goes from vague contemplation to all-out attack, the decision made in a deep enough level of his instincts that even with the full view of his mind Leareth might have trouble noticing it before it happens, if he isn't looking for it very closely.  That's how you start a fight when you mean to win it rather than just practice.  It's his body and he wants it - but more than that, he fights for it as if there was something truly important at stake, in a way that Leareth wouldn't have felt before, when Karal's brief attempts at struggle were only instinctive and without the full force of his will behind them.  He's thinking about what he's doing, now, to the extent that he can think about anything usefully in this strange ghostly struggle, but it turns out that a lot of his battle instincts carry over well enough.  He knows Leareth doesn't want his body the same way, doesn't care about being in it on the same deep level, and certainly doesn't know it as well, and all of that is an immediate advantage that he knows how to apply - how to use his hold on the dozens of specific physical details to make his position stronger, find a weak angle in one of the many places Leareth has to defend at once without being deeply familiar with them, and push until it breaks.

He is, still, being careful about his aim.  He's trying to take control, to force his way through the barrier separating him from his own flesh and muscle, not to push Leareth out.  (Though of course it will be some information on whether he could.)  He doesn't want to hurt him, either, and if more than a little of that seems to be happening, he'll stop.  It's a duel, not a mad struggle, and he's entirely capable of abiding by some rules while genuinely fighting to win.

(... A moment later there's a faint realization in the back of his mind that perhaps he could've been less aggressive about this.  Maybe Nayoki didn't mean this at all, or didn't expect him to just try it without asking.  But he's a warrior, so this was the first thought that came to him, and he didn't wait for a second one and risk losing whatever advantage of surprise there was to be had.  At this point the alternative doesn't matter and doesn't need to be considered - he chose this way, so he'll go through with it rather than second-guessing himself and failing to do either option reasonably.  But if one of them tells him to stop, he will.)