In the meantime he would still like to do something about the compulsion, although all this thinking is making him feel less opposed to it.  Finding it should be... similar to the way he looked at Leareth's mind with Empathy, and then tried and failed to look at his own, shouldn't it...  He tries doing something like that.  Mage-sight feels different enough, and less instinctive to him, that it takes a few tries to figure it out, but once he's figured out how to look at things at all, he can find the compulsion - he knows where it is, and by now has some feeling for what shields look like.

And then what?... He can try... pulling on it... Ugh, no, that just makes it slide weirdly over his mind and maybe do something it shouldn't be doing but definitely doesn't make it stop.  What can you do about magic?  His instinct with a shield would be to try to smash through it the way he would with a physical barrier, if going around wasn't an option, but he doesn't think trying to smash things in their mind would be a good idea.  What he wants to do is just... touch it in some way that will make it disappear, the way you can just appear magic by intending it... but it does not seem to work both ways.  He stops trying things and looks more closely - there seems to be some... flow or tension... to the structure?  Something that makes it look like if it's cut in a specific place it'll come undone rather than just leaving two spell-halves.  It still takes him a while to figure out how to do that, but... like this, maybe...?

That works! It does feel like he maybe did it a little bit wrong, or something - the tiny loop of magic destabilizes and snaps back on them rather than just dissolving, not intense enough to hurt but it's certainly disorienting. 

Leareth is impressed! A brief flash of delight flickers across his thoughts, notable just because Leareth's emotional affect is usually on the flatter side. Karal clearly has excellent intuitions for magic use, and must have been ambiently picking up mage-work-related habits just by watching Leareth, most people need a lot more formal training just to make sense of mage-sight and control it finely enough to focus on the compulsion like that. 

He's happy to have gotten it right, and more happy to know Leareth thinks he's good at this clearly important skill.

He has been watching Leareth very closely, because magic is so fascinating - he likes the way it feels, nearly physical, like learning to use an invisible muscle you never knew you had.  He likes the way it feels when Leareth does it, because there's nothing in the world like the detailed view of someone being that skilled and fast at a complicated physical task.

(And the way he's getting the complete inside view of it must help with learning.  Not just seeing the pattern of the spells, but what thoughts precede them and how it feels to get it right - and to get it really right, the way Leareth does, a single instinctive complex motion, not simplified instructions for a beginner thinking through every step.)

... Ah, they were going to find Nayoki, weren't they.  He can do that with Empathy, much more easily than yesterday, and walk in her direction while seeing if he can push a touch of curiosity toward her without getting everyone else in range.  (Since Leareth did say it's all right to risk doing harmless surprising things to people around here.)

(They do mildly startle one woman coming out of one of the rooms off the hallway - not someone Karal has met before, but after a couple of seconds of blinking and looking bemused, she smiles and waves before hurrying off to wherever it is she needs to get to quickly.) 

And it does seem like Karal was successfully able to get Nayoki's attention, because she sticks her head out of the room she's in before they've actually reached it! "Karal! And Leareth. How are you?" 

("I'm sorry, I've only had Gifts for a few days," Karal explains to the startled woman, and assumes she'll figure out the rest of the story from there.)

"Quite well!"  Except that bizarre moment of confused panic earlier in the day, which he maybe should talk to Nayoki about at some point, but it doesn't feel important at the moment.  He's had a very good couple of hours since then.  "We wanted to try some experiments with compulsions or other things where we're not sure if they'll affect one or both of us, if you have time?"

(It's probably a good idea to talk to Nayoki about it before they dive back into reviewing the Foresight dream notes, given how Leareth has little more idea than Karal does what's going to come up in them, and it would be surprising if it didn't involve more reminders of the war. But Leareth also doesn't feel especially driven to get into it right now.) 

"Oh! That is a good idea. And, yes, I have time now. We should go to a Work Room." She can lead the way. "Have you made friends with anyone else here yet? I know everyone is very curious about you." 

He'll follow her to a Work Room, and add all this to his small but expanding mental map of where everything is in this place.

"Yes!  I had fun talking to Barjon just now, he's great, even if he's another one of those people who will take a complicated game and make it five times more complicated just for fun."  Nearly everyone here will be like this and Karal isn't really complaining.  "And I met Galit and Esta, they were quieter but they seem like nice people.  I was just telling Leareth how surprisingly good and friendly this place is."

"I am glad! ...People will want to be people anywhere, I think, I am not sure that is the hard part? The hard part is - making it so people can remember to be careful enough and paranoid enough, but still be relaxed and trust their friends here?" 

Work Room! It's one set up for sparring or the explosive kind of spell-testing, rather than other kinds of research; it has approximately no furniture, just a couple of easily-replaceable wooden folding stools against the wall. Nayoki seems content to stand. 

"Hmm. I think first, I would be curious to see if a compulsion to limit movement - if I cast it quickly without much care, which is realistic for a fight - also affects the one of you who is not in control of the body at the moment it is cast, or whether it gives you a way to route around it? Which way do you want to try it first?" 

Does Karal have a preference? Leareth is pretty curious to see if Karal can take control if Leareth was the one in charge and was compulsioned; he feels like Karal will have more avenues to try interesting things. 

Will he?  He's not currently thinking of any interesting things, but they might come to him once it's happening.  Might as well start with that, then, since they'll want to do both in any case.

"That sounds really useful, yes.  Leareth's going to take over and you can try it then?"

Leareth takes over. It's quite obvious to Nayoki when he's done so, but he says "Ready," anyway. 

Nayoki is very skilled with compulsions! She's not as fast as Leareth - and would have a much harder time casting a complicated compulsion on the fly while distracted - but she can overall match him for finesse. 

She's not even trying to do that. She'll aim for about the level of skill of a mercenary with standard combat training and a few "special tricks", who's also in a hurry and being somewhat sloppy as a result.

The compulsion is roughly "don't move", which is less limiting than "don't take volitional actions" - simple if you're trained in it, but not something that would occur to most random mercenaries - and won't result in Leareth collapsing on the floor. 

It wouldn't actually be hard to resist and snap the thread of magic as she's laying it down - Nayoki can involuntarily get a compulsion on him if she's trying and he's not pre-warned, which is emphatically not true of most people, but she's not currently trying nearly hard enough. Leareth doesn't resist, though; he mentally walks through what he would do where Karal can see it, but lets the compulsion land. 

And now he's unable to move from the spot where he's standing! 

The obvious thing to try is just taking over the body and see if he can move.  (The compulsion doesn't prevent Leareth from letting him, although he wonders if there are common ones that would, and if so how the obvious next step would go.)

... Apparently he cannot?  That's disappointing, he was really hoping this would straightforwardly work.

His immediate next impulse is to argue with the compulsion - not even because he knows you can think around them sometimes, but because he genuinely feels it obviously shouldn't work this way.  They're separate people, just that Leareth isn't allowed to move shouldn't impact Karal that way, any more than it would presumably impact someone reaching over to physically push Leareth or move his arm.  Can he really not?

--Although that isn't really quite what's happening, because the body is his and it's not intuitive to think about it otherwise - but Leareth was, and this is entirely true, using magic to cause Karal's body to move, and there is no sensible reason for an opponent to consider their compulsion as extending to Karal, who is a separate person and who had no ability to do anything when it landed.

(Hmm, if Leareth leaned hard enough into conceptualizing himself as using magic to cause Karal's body to move rather than doing any moving himself, could he do it directly?  Either if he took control back now, or if the compulsion was on Karal to start with?  Karal doesn't think he can move without thinking of it as moving, but it would make sense for Leareth to be able to do that.)

He also wonders whether something about his mental state before the compulsion landed could change the result here, although that would be harder to work with.  Or something about how the control passed between them - if Leareth didn't give it up voluntarily would this more clearly count as Leareth not moving?

Arguing with the compulsion that it shouldn't work like that does not, by itself, cause it to work in a different more polite way! 

(Leareth's thoughts are fond and amused. It's obvious that he's relaxed, and not experiencing the unable-to-move as a threat.) 

Leareth unfortunately doesn't think he could get around it by conceptualizing himself as "using magic to move Karal's body" - it's not really...true...that there's an active mage-work effect involved in him sharing Karal's body on an ongoing basis, though there was magic involved at the moment he turned up. (It might be easier if Leareth were more able to - well, be sloppy in his thinking about it - but he doesn't think it's a tractable avenue to lean into.) 

You can think your way around compulsions, though, it was an ongoing challenge in the Eastern Empire. More "upstream" motivation-affecting compulsions have more wiggle room, as do more complicated compulsions trying to block, for example, the entire category of "committing acts of sabotage"; it's going to be harder to think sideways around this compulsion because of its simplicity. But, for example, it probably wouldn't block a purely-reflexive startle reaction. That doesn't by itself help them but maybe it points at a direction Karal could try things in? 

(...Leareth probably could literally move their body by magic, if he wanted, by using mage-barriers to push their limbs where he wanted and counting on the reflex to keep his balance when pushed being sufficiently involuntary. It would be incredibly awkward and not actually useful in a fight, though, especially when he's in no way impaired from just Gating out and in a real fight that would be the obvious smart move.) 

(That last thing does sound incredibly awkward!)

So the compulsion really just is on both of them (even though he continues to feel like it shouldn't be and it's vaguely insulting that the world works otherwise) and he'd need to find some different approach entirely.  Hmm...  He does have the impulse to immediately do the opposite of what the compulsion is, even if he's not trying to break it, just to properly feel the thing he can't do -- this is interesting, would it not count as moving if he was fully expecting the movement not to happen and just trying it anyway for other reasons?  That would be strange and kind of hilarious, and probably won't work or someone would've figured it out already.  (He might need a new compulsion to try it on, it's harder to lean into an impulse after sitting on it for a few minutes.)

Other ways to lean into startle-like reflexes seem like they would be... bad habits.  Much like Leareth is averse to sloppy thinking, Karal doesn't think it's a good idea to be the sort of person who does things without thinking of them as what they are.  (Unless focusing directly on the end result instead of the method works - "I'm not moving, I'm just over there" - but it can't possibly, too many people would've noticed, although he tries it anyway just in case, since that sort of mental motion is easy enough.)

(Trying to "just be over there" instead of trying to move indeed doesn't work, but it does feel like it less firmly doesn't-work? The compulsion is there, sitting in the way, but the way he's poking around it makes it somehow feel more obvious that it's a thing, a magical object placed on his mind like so, with edges and boundaries - and things it clearly doesn't ban, like breathing, even though his chest is moving in the process...) 

...Leareth, with amusement, is thinking that this might actually be easier if Nayoki had done the most neat and skillful compulsion she's capable of, and targeted Leareth, the person she knows very well. The way it actually landed felt like the way a compulsion would be flung during an actual fight, aimed hastily at "that person right there" - 

There's a moment of alarm when Leareth goes and makes him think about breathing as moving, because now he can't, although obviously neither of them will let him come to harm-- oh, and now he can again, apparently because he did it without thinking about it?  Which gives him a still better feeling for what exactly the edge is between the allowed and disallowed sorts of mental states...

(Trying to think around things this way does not come instinctively to him.  He would do terribly in the Eastern Empire, he expects.  In all honesty he'd probably have given up already if it wasn't for Leareth's encouragement and the way him trying things makes Leareth think fond thoughts.)

This does make it seem like one of his earlier ideas might be useful, from a different angle - this clearly works better if he's trying to do something else, and something absorbing enough that he doesn't think about all the details of what's happening...  Fight me?  He gives up control and immediately tries to take it back.  If he's not trying to move, just trying to get control of his body, which he can do as a pretty reflexive action if he leans into that part of himself, and the process of fighting for it involves attempting to push the body in instinctive-to-him ways, most of which (he doesn't think about it but it's still true) happen to be movement rather than stillness, and mostly useful movement at that...  (For instance maybe the most him-rather-than-Leareth motion, and thus a good angle to push from in the internal fight, is drawing his sword.)

Nayoki does notice him running into the breathing problem - she's watching closely - and readies herself to intervene, but isn't surprised when she doesn't need to, she's never heard of anyone getting in serious trouble from that even with more restrictive compulsions like "no volitional actions." 

She watches intently and curiously with Mindhealing Sight. It's actually nontrivial to correlate the compulsion (visible with mage-sight) to the shadow it leaves on a structure she's perceiving more metaphorically via an entire different sense, but - it seems like there should be an angle there, if maybe a narrow and fiddly one - 

Fighting for control of their body without intending to - or being capable of - doing anything with it, is a slightly non-obvious mental move, but Leareth can manage to offer some resistance; stillness is a fairly instinctive-for-Leareth way to be holding the body anyway. He deliberately aims for more of a token resistance, enough that Karal has something to fight against but not trying all out. 

And - 

- it doesn't work consistently, the first time he takes over he doesn't manage to fold a sufficiently involuntary instinctive movement into it and is left "in control" but still subject to the compulsion. But the second time, he can manage an instinctive drawing-his-sword! 

He grins happily, which also doesn't count as a deliberate action. 

Talking he definitely cannot manage.  I'm not sure what use this would be in most circumstances, but it's interesting that it works at all, and it'd at least be confusing and distracting...  He'll have to keep an eye out for mental habits that could make it more useful.  (Although probably Leareth is going to have more ideas than he will.)

He's looking forward to seeing how Leareth goes about trying this when they do it the other way around, in any case.  And to whatever else Nayoki comes up with.  This isn't natural and pleasant the way Empathy is, but he dislikes compulsions enough to make it satisfying to poke holes in them, and it is an interesting mental puzzle.  (...Since when is that a thing he cares about?  People being like this is infectious, apparently!)

It's definitely useful to know that the fact of there being two of them lets them get around compulsions at all, including in cases where Leareth wouldn't expect he could have just thought his way around it in the past. It would take a much more contrived scenario than a random ambush for it to come up at all, since Leareth can Gate out faster than most mages can cast a compulsion, and if he's conscious and resisting there aren't many people who could land a compulsion on him at all. But if they were unconscious, somehow, and then later had to figure out a way to leave despite precautions... It's still very unlikely but there are cases where it could make a difference, which Leareth is deeply appreciative of. 

Nayoki grins at them, and - once it's clear that this hasn't given Karal a fully general way around it - removes the compulsion. "That was impressive! How did you do it - I was not reading your thoughts or anything -?"