(Oh, right, Suncats are a thing! That exist! Leareth...had forgotten that, or at least it hadn't been very close to the surface of his memories. He agrees it's a similar intervention, though the enormous blatant magical barrier around Iftel seems to be overall more Vkandis' style. ...Valdemar doesn't know which god is responsible for the Companions, interestingly. King Valdemar prayed to all the gods whose names he knew at the time, and whichever god or gods answered didn't seem inclined to claim credit for it.) 

(Nayoki made sure to brief everyone in the facility about Leareth's new situation, and everyone is unsurprisingly very curious! Rosta, who tends to move around between a few of the research facilities anyway, transferred over - partly on Nayoki's suggestion - so that she could keep up her acquaintance with Karal, and she's been sharing gossip about how "friendly and sweet" he is. Neither of which are words that anyone particularly associates with Leareth, and the staff are very curious.)

It's still the middle of the afternoon, and there aren't a lot of people ambiently in the hallway, but a few minutes of wandering will bring them to one of the common areas where people tend to congregate when taking breaks. It's also lit with mage-lights, and furnished with rugs, a small round table with chairs around it, and a few soft cushioned armchairs. One of the stone walls is polished to a smooth matte surface, and seems to see regular use as a surface to write on with chalk; half of it is covered in what's either obscure math or obscure magical notation, and the entire lower region, around knee-height, is covered in clumsy but quite detailed drawings of birds. 

There are three people there right now, none of whom Karal has met; two men are playing some sort of game with polished stone pieces, and a woman is reading a book in one of the armchairs. 

(...Wait, the enormous what around where??  Reading the rest of the context from Leareth's mind doesn't... make this any less boggling... but it does at least explain why there's a country not that far away which Karal has never to his knowledge heard of.  All the maps just assume there's nothing north of Hardorn the same way there's nothing (ha) north of Valdemar.  He wonders how many other bizarre things are going on in the world outside of his increasingly obviously limited circle of knowledge.  But yes, he really should have a normal conversation with someone, instead of thinking about strange things far away until he forgets how being a person works.)

What a good home-y place.  --And oh, that is adorable.  Since nobody's in the middle of a conversation he feels immediately moved to join, Karal will sit down on the floor and carefully add a bird to the collection - one the wall doesn't have already, if he can think of one, but probably this small child (?) hasn't gone through all the common species specifically from Karse.  Or is he wrong about that?  He looks at the existing drawings, curious whether the child is going out into the tundra to see the local birds and draw them, or copying from books, and if so whether the books are from a familiar region or somewhere with different species entirely.

If anyone's looking at him when he's done, which he wasn't aiming for but thinks is likely anyway, he'll smile at them and introduce himself; otherwise he'll go see how the game with stones works, since many people don't like to be interrupted while reading.

It is kiiiind of hard to tell what some of the drawings are going for, but it's probably birds from books, given the variety – in addition to recognizable ducks and geese and what are probably little songbirds, there's a bird with incredibly long knobby-kneed legs, and that one has an enormous two-pronged tail, this other one has a large spoonlike beak that Karal has never seen the like of before. 

One of the men at the game-table smiles back at him. "You'll make Kalira very happy," he says in Rethwellani, with an accent Karal doesn't recognize. "- I'm Barjon, by the way, and this is Galit. Care to join us?" 

It's a strategy game, with some elaborate rules involving which positions of stones let you "capture" one of your game-partner's stones. Barjon is happy to explain the rules, which seem like they would end up involving a lot of mental math to carry out.

"I'd like that."  It's a good thing they were in the middle of a game already, since it means Karal can watch and try to make sense of the rules instead of immediately being invited to try it himself.  He asks questions until he can follow what's going on, but he's not sure it's his sort of downtime activity.

"Where are you from?  I don't even recognize the accent."

(Leareth wonders vaguely if he taught people games like this to encourage them to do something that trains working memory, if they're going to be gambling on it anyway - which they will - or if it's just inherently popular among the sort of people who tend to end up working at one of his research bases. He doesn't start out remembering this exact game, but does clearly pick up the rules much faster than Karal does.) 

Barjon grins. "Velvar! It's south of Jkatha, west of Seejay. By the Dhorisha Plains. Though I was recruited in Mournedealth."

(Karal probably has heard of Mournedealth – it's in Jkatha near the border with Rethwellan, not that far from Karse, and it's known as a top destination for recruiting mercenary companies.) 

(Of course he does.  It makes Karal tempted to try letting Leareth play while he chats with people, at some point, but it would probably be strange or even intimidating and he should leave it for much later.  The idea of Leareth trying to optimize the games people play for their benefit is both funny and plausible, but Karal suspects it wouldn't work if they weren't the sort of people to do that anyway.)

"I think I could find some of these places on a map," he grins.  "I've barely been outside of Karse before this week."

"What do you do here?  I know what I've heard of Mournedealth for..."  He looks the man over curiously.  Not that he objects to math people liking math, or magic, but someone more familiar would be nice.

Grin. "I was a mercenary! It's a family business, more or less. My grandfather was a mercenary all his life, split off to start his own company eventually - over some feud with the captain I never really understood, for all that he brings it up half the times he's in his cups - then my father took over from him. My older brother Gestaf's going to take it over, someday. I was never in the running for that, but - it's a good career, for a mage. Figured I'd save up for a while, leave the business and settle down when I met a nice girl. Up until Leareth hired our company for - well, I guess it was a test mission. He wanted us stationed in some Jkathan town to 'keep the peace' during their Midsummer festival, which I thought'd be dead boring, but Father said that's the best sort of job if you can get it."

He shakes his head. "Only, I guess Leareth'd found out by accident, when he had his spies looking into something or other in the area, that one of the other noble families from the area was plotting mischief with the local lord and his family. Over a girl and a marriage that hadn't gone as planned, I never did follow all the details. But we ended up pretty busy after all. And meanwhile Leareth had one of his people staying at the same inn to keep an eye on us - he was vetting us for if wanted to hire my father for his plans later, I guess - and I got to talking, and - might've been showing off, a little, I'd bought a book of obscure combat magic the last summer and was trying to teach myself some of the techniques - and next thing I know, the man was asking me if I'd ever considered inventing new magic for a living. Which I hadn't, but it sounded intriguing, and," shrug, a slightly embarrassed grin, "one thing led to another." 

Karal likes this man and his stories.  "Why did Leareth even care about some Jkathan noble girl's marriage?  Or was he only looking for something interesting to get you to do for a test?  Sounds like it worked out well, either way."

"What sort of magic have you been inventing?  I'll admit I was hoping for the other sort of mercenary - one day I'll have to find someone here to spar with - but combat magic still sounds closer to something I might be able to wrap my head around than the other things going on here."

He can keep up a cheerful conversation for a long while.  He's definitely interested in combat magic on the tactical level, and might be interested in the invention process if it turns out to be the sort with relatively less math in it.  He wants to know how long Barjon's been here, how he likes it, if he has any complaints about living far north in the middle of nowhere.  He could be talked into a game, although preferably a less complicated one.

"Oh, I assume it was just a good test mission - makes sense in hindsight, he's planning to occupy a country, he'd want to make sure all the mercenaries involved can keep things under control without killing anyone -" 

Barjon will also mention that he's probably up for sparring! It's not his favorite leisure activity, but he does try to stay in shape, and he spends part of his time teaching combat magic to the researchers who don't have that background - it's just pretty useful if everyone can defend themselves in an emergency - so he needs to stay in practice to avoid embarrassing himself. The tactical aspect is more interesting to him than just sparring - he's particularly drawn to looking for ways to invent low-power combat techniques. He's been working on a little spell that makes the ground impossibly slippery, so that anyone not paying attention will lose their footing or at least be distracted. 

(He likes the north fine, though he does look forward to the occasional trip to somewhere that isn't tundra and has, like, shops and taverns. And pretty girls. Not that there aren't any women here, but the ratio is not even.

Galit also contributes occasionally, though he's much quieter and clearly not entirely fluent in Rethwellani. He's from Crane, a tiny country all the way on the southern coast, and only joined up six months ago.) 

Barjon can teach Karal the original game that this one is based on! It's a lot simpler! The variant is, well, see, one time they were waiting for a magical experiment that was going to take a while to finish, and someone decided it would be fun to come up with harder rules and make bets on who could still keep track of it in their head versus needing paper... 

Great, Karal will absolutely look for him for sparring sometime.  What he's good with is just the sword (and he's decent with a few other things and unarmed), but he should learn some combat magic at some point, "My mage-gift only awakened last week, I don't know how to do anything," so practice with that should be helpful too, once he gets to the point of having anything to practice. 

Shops and taverns are indeed great.  Karal spent his last several years at the front, so this place seems wonderfully comfortable, although he's not fond of being underground so much.

Karal was not, to be honest, clear on there being a southern coast - he really needs to get a map and hang it in his room and maybe put little pins in the places he meets people from.  But he wants to know all about what far-away countries are like.

He laughs at the story behind the game complications.  "Why are you all like this!  Well, I know why, but it still makes for such a different place."  He shakes his head.  (And sends Leareth an amused thought about how the harder version of the game was immediately used as an opportunity for more gambling.)

He will learn the original game, though, and do halfway decently at it - it's one of those things designed to mirror real-life tactical intuitions and he can make sense of it that way more than by counting anything explicitly, although that does result in the occasional ridiculous mistake.

The map is a good idea. Leareth's own sense of where places are is definitely not entirely intact, so it'll be helpful for him as well. Karal learning some mage-work himself is also not a bad idea, even if it would usually make sense for Leareth to be in charge of that - it seems like it would be good for him, and it's almost always better to be able to do more things.

He makes a mental note to make sure Karal gets some time in control of the body when it next makes sense for them to travel to a city. ...Not that he's incredibly inclined to have that be soon. 

Karal plays very differently from how Leareth would, and it might be interesting at some point to play in a more collaborative way. (He wonders if there's any way they could play against each other - it would require Leareth deliberately not looking at Karal's thoughts, or else a game and setup that still made sense with both of them able to see the other's thought...) This is Karal's time, though, and Leareth is content to hang back. 

Galit leaves halfway through the game to return to his work. The woman also puts away her book at some point, though she pauses before leaving to wave and introduce herself as Esta.

Barjon wins, though not by an enormous margin, and seems to enjoy himself enormously. He looks tempted to stay for a second game, but excuses himself as well. "See you at the dining hall tonight, maybe! Though don't wait for me or anything, I might be finished late." 

Karal continues to be friendly to everyone and very much enjoy the company.  "Some other day if not tonight!  It's been good talking to you.  And don't think I've forgotten about that sparring offer."

Playing against each other sounds worth trying sometime!  It seems a pleasant enough relaxing activity, and of the sort that won't leave Leareth bored.  (Playing collaboratively would be interesting, but would also feel like - not exactly cheating, it might be fine and in fact it might be entertaining for everyone involved to see if people guess that it's happening - or of course he could just say it in advance - but either way he'd need to know people better before he can guess how that would go, and it seems better to get them used to him and Leareth separately before making the social situation more complicated.)

He'll look forward to a future city visit, but it's not important at all.  This place, strange as it is in some ways, is good, and Karal thinks he'll be happy here.  He wasn't sure what it would be like - given what the purpose of it is, the closest natural equivalent is less a castle or town and more an army encampment or maybe even a bandit camp, and those vary a lot - well, army encampments do, he doesn't know about bandit camps but he assumes the same - from reasonable homey places full of friendly people to groups of strangers too full of mistrust and resentment to be anything else.  It speaks well of Leareth and his ability to manage his complicated large-scale plans, that his people are like this.  (It's not that he had doubts of Leareth's ability to manage large groups in general - Altarrin obviously could - but it wasn't really an option, in the high positions in the Eastern Empire, to have people feel friendly and trusting.)

Well, Karal feels recovered enough.  Which of their long list of necessary things should they do next?  It still feels like something that isn't more dream records would be a better idea, but it's not as if that doesn't leave them with multiple options.  (And first they could- well, he's not sure if a map large enough to hang on the wall is something he can just find in the library and take for himself, or if he should ask someone to buy or copy one, but presumably there's some way to get that to happen.)

(Yes, playing collaboratively is definitely something where he would intend to tell people they were doing that, and probably play with a separate handicap - or maybe against multiple other people, if they pick a game where that's a thing.) 

Leareth is glad that Karal likes it here! It feels like particularly high praise, coming from him. And Leareth does think he's worked hard on it; it's certainly not something that comes automatically, when everyone involved here has been filtered for being willing to countenance a plan that involves invading a country, building an empire, and killing ten million people for power. But it's particularly important for the scholars, he thinks, to feel - relaxed and comfortable and like they have space to be curious. He suspects the more purely military bases have a different feel, though it also seems possible that Karal would feel more at home there in some ways. 

What to do next... Leareth needs to at some point review all the technical details on the god-creation process, which might be boring for Karal but probably won't be intensely emotional? He should spend some time in a Work Room reviewing magic he knows; the fact that Karal's Gift and body are at full adult strength means it's less critical for him to spend a lot of time practicing - usually it's a critical part of pushing an adolescent Gift to full power as quickly as possible - but he probably has forgotten a lot of fiddly details, for magic that he would have used more rarely, and he does eventually want his old comfort and fluency with it back. And of course there's a huge amount of historical records still to review, from the periods both before and after Altarrin and Matteir's era. All of these are projects of weeks or months, and about equal priority – does Karal have a preference? 

He's most curious to see more magic.  (Leareth is right that it's not a high priority for Karal to be able to do any, but yes, he does just like the ability to do more things, and in the meantime just watching Leareth do them will be enjoyable too, and probably useful for future learning.  He remembers how fascinating the Gates felt.)  Technical details sound fine too - he still wonders if there's a way for him to do something else while Leareth does the sorts of things that will definitely not make sense to him, but probably they should spend some time on it without any complications first.

They also wanted to do compulsion and other testing at some point, in things he's specifically interested in. 

That's a good idea! And would combine well with reviewing specifically concert-work types of magic. Leareth is inclined to see if Nayoki is free for it; she's likely to come up with the most informative compulsion-experiments, and - everyone at this base is trusted, obviously, but he doesn't on an emotional level trust most people to cast compulsions on him. 

That is incredibly reasonable of him!  And Karal was assuming Nayoki would do it anyway - she has a unique view of minds that might help if they get any complicated results, and besides, she sounded so excited about it.

He is... not sure how he feels about anyone casting compulsions on him, now that he thinks about it... but he will deal with it anyway, for an experiment.

...Would it help to have experienced it first? Leareth definitely can't do the experiment properly, but he can probably cast a simple compulsion on both of them, given how he knows for sure he can cast one on himself. 

He... should in theory obviously do that, yes, but it'll take Karal a moment to actually bring himself to say so, apparently. 

What a terribly unpleasant concept, compulsions. 

It's not that he doesn't trust Leareth to not make it terribly unpleasant, which he assumes is an option in theory - probably it won't even feel like much? - but the thought is still so wrong. 

... Leareth is his lord and can do whatever he likes to him, and it's all right for him to.  (He could have agreed without this, of course.  He is not a child.  But this way he can genuinely relax, instead of tensing up in anticipation of some invisibly terrible thing.)

Yes. 

...Leareth is a little curious why it seems so viscerally awful to Karal - it feels like there's something more there than his own pragmatic wariness, and it's probably something different from the Heralds' bright-line moral rejection of the concept, he already noticed Karal not having that about blood-magic - but it's not necessarily relevant right now, if he can tell that Karal is relaxed about it. 

Skillfully done compulsions don't intrinsically feel like anything in particular, unless you count them showing up to mage-sight. The standard secrecy compulsions used in the inner circle of his organization wouldn't feel like anything, since the action banned - "revealing sensitive project information to someone not cleared for it" - is not actually possible while everyone in the building is so cleared, and it's not trying to ban thinking about the concept of, say, Gating somewhere else to reveal project secrets.

(In his post-Eastern Empire work, Leareth tries quite hard not to use compulsions that block thinking about something; if you're looking at a problem and feeling like it could only be addressed by motivation-affecting or thought-affecting compulsions, that's a good flag that either you haven't laid it out clearly enough to specify an action-affecting compulsion, or else should be looking for non-mind-control solutions. Under the current model, someone shouldn't be in the running to get a secrecy compulsion and learn sensitive project information in the first place unless they've been thoroughly vetted and Leareth trusts their intentions and their ordinary oath - it's just that, in practice, additionally using secrecy compulsions does add further protection and reliability, if only by preventing some of the implausible and contrived scenarios that the gods would otherwise be inclined to engineer.) 

Leareth will do a simple action-blocking compulsion first, not to leave the room. Karal will be able to notice the whisper of mage-energies moving, if he's paying attention to mage-sight - it's really not a lot of power, it could easily be missed in a fight while much 'brighter' levinbolts and fireballs were being flung around - and, since Leareth is also holding his thoughts open by default, he can pick up on Leareth's intent, though it goes by very quickly. Once it's cast, it indeed doesn't feel like anything as long as Karal is not in fact trying to get up and leave the room. 

(It's very simple, and thus unsophisticated; Leareth didn't put any particular thought into trying to loophole-proof what counts as "this room" or "leaving", and it's not self-protecting, there's nothing stopping either of them - well, except for lack of skill with the mage-gift in Karal's case - from just removing it again.) 

He's not... entirely sure why?  Maybe it's just that he didn't realize it was possible until this week, to do something like this.  It feels more invasive than anything that can be done to the body rather than the mind, and more clearly unpleasant just because of the suddenness of the new knowledge.  But no, it's not really a moral rejection - he sees how useful it is and there's nothing wrong with it in theory when all the alternatives are worse, just... augh.  It's... making someone less of a person, in something like the same way as he felt about the concept of Companions bonding nearly-irreversibly to children.  Making choices is what people are for.

(Probably the fact that his first significant exposure to the concept was the awful tangle of the Eastern Empire didn't help - he doesn't think he'd be entirely happy with the idea even with a better introduction, but there are options that would make it feel a lot less wrong.  Taking prisoners and compulsioning them not to try to escape seems fairly straightforwardly all right, he thinks because it's clearly adversarial rather than some more unpleasantly blurry thing.  Blocking actions rather than thoughts helps somewhat, although it's not quite the distinction he's making.)

His instincts rebel at the idea of being under a secrecy compulsion too - mostly because of how insulting it feels, if his word is not trusted then what is the point - but Leareth's careful reasoning does make it better.  If the underlying reason is not lack of trust but wanting additional protection against bizarrely improbable god-manipulations, yes, he can see how that makes sense.  Although there's still something nigglingly wrong about it...  People grow by being trusted, by learning to be as trustworthy as you expect of them, even faced with bizarre and improbable things - and of course letting them learn it would mean taking some risks, but there's something lost, too, by not giving them the chance.

Once he sees the compulsion in Leareth's thoughts, he immediately does try to get up and leave the room.  (He didn't consciously realize he'd have that impulse, but apparently he does, his mind instinctively pushing against the wrong thing in it.  That too seems like a way in which compulsions might make people worse allies rather than better ones, but maybe most people don't have this problem in the first place.)  Of course he can't, and it's all right, it just feels better to feel the inability than to have it a strange invisible unfelt thing.  He does take a few seconds standing there getting used to the idea, and then tentatively reaches for the mage-gift to see if he can still find the compulsion once it's in place, and whether he could pick it apart.  (Presumably Leareth will stop him if he's doing something that's a bad idea.)

Leareth agrees that it feels much cleaner, to use compulsions in obviously adversarial situations, where the alternative is generally violence or literal chains. 

He agrees that it's - giving something up - to rely on compulsions instead of building trust the normal way, and giving people space to build trustworthiness. And he can see why that might be particularly salient to Karal. He remembers watching Karal's thoughts crystallize around giving his oath not to act against Leareth, how it settled into being unthinkable. Obviously it's better, if people can be - fully in alignment with themselves, like that, choosing to constrain their future options because they fully endorse the consequences of being that shape. Leareth feels a not-dissimilar way about giving his own oath (though, relatedly, he does it rarely and is very careful about what exactly he's agreeing to and what the other party thinks he's agreeing to.) He's...maybe in the habit of not expecting most people to be like that, or particularly interested in trying to be like that?

(And there are a lot of ways someone can feel bound by their honor that he thinks are - mostly bad, or at least reduce his options for working with them - especially when they've come to it instinctively like Karal. He actually thinks it's rare, and surprising, and definitely impressive, for someone to be - the general sort of person Karal is - and still be this able to work with someone like Leareth. Though maybe he's wrong about that; it's not like he's been sharing thoughts to this extent with very many other people.) 

Leareth knows that he currently uses compulsions in a few other situations – in particular, he's planning to use strictly time-limited compulsions to enforce the required code of conduct for his soldiers during the invasion, because this is predictably very difficult otherwise even if you try to vet everyone in advance and only accept people willing to sign a contract and swear an oath saying that they definitely won't rape any civilians. 

He thinks he's also tried to use compulsions in the past - in Predain, specifically, but quite possibly at other times later - to, basically, jump from an equilibrium where it's taken for granted that all the authorities are corrupt and the real rules are "you can do whatever you have the power to get away with", to one where the official law can actually be treated as real? It's clearly not as good as the real thing, it's - cheating, in a way, trying to force the matter through imposing your own power rather than appealing to higher principles that people might have in common. And he would hesitate now, knowing more than he did then about, not just the limits in how well it works in the first place and how much corruption still fits in the cracks, but the difficulties of moving on from a heavily compulsion-based hierarchy to one where people are trustworthy and behave themselves without that. But he does feel sympathetic to Ma'ar, young and desperate, looking for a way that things could change this year and not in some nebulous future. 

He lets Karal have the mage-gift to poke at finding the compulsion. He's hovering "nearby" in case Karal does something ill-advised by accident, but compulsions are sufficiently low-powered that even breaking one clumsily will just be startling, not harmful. And he's very curious if Karal will be able to figure it out.

(The compulsion is hard to find again now that it's been cast - it's lower-power than, for example, a lot of the shielding on them - but Karal did see exactly where and how Leareth deposited it.) 

Karal is... not sure how much other people are or want to be like that.  In some places he does think they are, and his home was one of those, but - even so it's often an idealized concept more than something people try to be fully shaped by the way he is.  He too was surprised to find something matching that in Leareth.  It may well be true that most of the people here have shaped themselves in different ways, and it wouldn't particularly matter to them.

He does think Karse made him more the sort of person who could work with Leareth.  There are old ideals of honor there, but there's also a lot of cruelty and violence and lawlessness, and it forces you to think about which parts of honor are the important ones, what you need to hold to in order to maintain the ability to do something better even among enemies, or just people you disagree with about a lot of what's acceptable conduct.  The Heralds in Valdemar can declare all their principles infinitely important and not have this quickly lead to disaster or contradiction - or at least contradiction that's obvious enough, and that touches someone or something they care about.  (He wonders what they'd think about the compulsions planned for the invasion forces.  That seems fine to him - an obviously worse choice than if you could have an army that simply won't, but you almost never do.  It might be possible, sometimes, to build that much trust with nearly all your soldiers, up and down the entire command structure, but - it would be extremely rare, and in Leareth's unexplainable war it has to be just about impossible.  Valdemar can simply say they will never have the question come up, but he agrees with Leareth that this is giving up too much - and that it hobbles their thinking, when they say "we'd never do this" and thus not only don't require but don't allow themselves to consider the question of which way they would consider better if they had to.)

He doesn't know that Leareth did the wrong thing in Predain, either.  He doesn't like compulsions, but he would even less like being in a place where people assumed they couldn't trust his word.  One could build something just with thoughtsensing verification, if you could convince enough people to genuinely intend to be trustworthy and trust that their intention would hold, but... yes, it would be hard and he doesn't know if it would work, when none of them were used to it.  If he had been Ma'ar's, he doesn't think he would have considered his choices wrong.

... One thing Karal clearly isn't good at is making sure other people know what exactly he means, especially people he didn't share a culture and half his life with.  I do owe you another oath, once you've had time to think about it.  (But the mindreading helps, he assumes.  It's so good, that Leareth was able to watch him give his word and see what it meant.)