That's a very reasonable request and Nayoki can push a reasonably clear visual across to Karal - Leareth as she remembers him from a conversation a few months ago, intently focused on explaining some of the god-alignment work to her and several researchers... 

A burst of fondness at the memory.  "Thank you!"  It's good to have some face to imagine for Leareth that isn't his own.  "It does really suit him."

And yes, he should practice thought-unshielding later, he'd love to have that down.  ...Well, if Leareth likes.  They could also do other things that are more important than that.  (But at least he's apparently doing decently well at wanting things for himself, which he was just told was a good thing.)

"Ah, it's confusing, trying to talk between the three of us half out loud and half over thoughts."  He's amused, not complaining.  "I suppose we'll get used to it."

He looks to see who's around in the dining hall, and nods a greeting to any familiar faces, but it's probably better not to add even more people to this already complicated conversation. 

Leareth isn't even sure if he normally schedules all of his time that tightly! Certainly for right now, he's apparently still recovering his usual stamina and is feeling tired enough that he's not expecting to use the evening for anything that intellectually productive. Poking around with shielding seems like as reasonable a "rest" activity as anything else. 

Nayoki is amused. "Leareth and I were in the habit of conversations half in Mindspeech, it is not that weird. Mindspeech can be convenient when you are eating."

She can talk a bit more about the history of the northern operations. She knows that Leareth had started recruiting a small number of magical researchers over a century ago, in order to start checking the mostly-complete plans for his god and then, more recently, start planning the implementation. The military side of things is more recent than that, but Leareth had also been stockpiling resources - nonperishable food in particular, but magical artifacts as well - for the past century. This was never going to be a self-sustaining operation. 

Ah, he was somehow under the impression that Leareth normally spent all his time doing things.  It's probably for the best that he doesn't. 

He happily spends the mealtime chatting with Nayoki and filling in some more of his understanding of everything they're doing in the north.  It's such a large and strange operation, unlike anything he's encountered or heard of before - it'll be a while before he feels like he has a grasp of the whole thing, but it's starting to make sense or at least feel familiar.  And Nayoki clearly has everything well under control - not that he had any real doubt of that, but it feels more secure to have some actual knowledge underlying the conclusion.

(Leareth suspects he does spend quite a lot of time "doing things", but that not all of it is formally scheduled doing-things, unless he's traveling or has a time-sensitive project or something. It's important for your ability to think freely about things and notice when you're missing something, to have downtime, even if one spends a lot of that downtime doing unplanned math or magical experiments instead of planned ones.) 

He ends up nudging to take control for part of the conversation, when something Nayoki says offhand prompts a vague half-formed memory of there having been some sort of problem with setup for one of the military training bases, which is going to bother him until he's up to speed. Fortunately it doesn't take very long to get up to speed and it turns out the problem is now under control. 

Nayoki enjoys talking to both of them! She can spare three-quarters of a candlemark for dinner and conversation, though after that she does need to go back and finish some things before the day is over. 

"You, though, need to rest," she admonishes Leareth. (It's somehow pretty clear that it's aimed at Leareth, even though she had been talking to Karal fifteen seconds earlier.) 

...That's probably a good idea. It's not that late and Leareth isn't exactly sleepy, yet, but he definitely feels something like exhaustion at the prospect of trying to sit down and make focused progress on any of the main priorities. 

They can head back to their room and then spend a while poking around at shielding, though! Leareth can start by teaching Karal how to use mage-energies to shield, so that he has a starting point for manipulating their existing shielding in order to shield partially while putting some thoughts "outside", and it seems likely that watching Karal trying things will also help Leareth sort out what he needs to do to selectively shield himself.

(It's clear from Leareth's thoughts that he likes teaching magic - it's not that he dislikes his other work, for the most part, but there's an obvious intrinsic satisfaction he takes in demonstrating something for Karal and watching him try it and pointing out things he notices. Which is a lot of things! He's picking up that Karal learns better by observing and then experimenting himself, rather than following explicit step-by-step instructions, and Karal probably benefits less than Leareth does himself from explanations of the theory behind how shielding works. Sharing a mage-gift is very convenient for this, though, since it means Leareth can trivially demonstrate things "up close" for Karal, or try to push across the intuitions he has directly rather than having to put them into words.) 

Nayoki admonishing Leareth makes Karal laugh and nod - and think for a moment about how different her relationship with Leareth is from anything he's used to, and what he likes about it.

Magic, though!  Magic is lovely, and satisfying to learn.  He picks up shielding well enough - it's not his favorite skill, but he's had time to get used to the pattern of it and to how it feels to have it up or down.  The moment he gets it right, he starts experimenting with putting some thoughts outside, since he's seen that done as well.  Of course his first few attempts unravel the shields entirely, or do other more confusing things to them, but with some more demonstrations he gets that to work too.  In the end it turns out to be easier to put thoughts outside shields Leareth put up - he's not sure if it's because Leareth's shields are cleaner, or just because of something about his own mental framing of the process.

The theory mostly doesn't make much sense to him until he can manage to actually do the thing, but then the explanations match up with the mental motions in a way that helps him understand what he's doing and sometimes improve it.  Demonstrations are very helpful, and Leareth pushing across wordless intuitions works surprisingly well - the way they think of things doesn't always match, but it usually does.  Karal's nearly first experience of magic was Leareth doing it, and since then they've grown together enough that the way Leareth thinks about it just feels right.

He enjoys the process, and the feeling of Leareth's satisfaction in the shared work.  He spends some time practicing and incorporating more of Leareth's pointers, until he starts feeling like he might be able to do this and hold a conversation at the same time.  But he does tire our much faster than Leareth, since all this is new and effortful for him, and they still have a chunk of the evening left.

Thank you.  That was very enjoyable, and I think I should stop before I give us a headache.

He closes his eyes and relaxes for a moment.  If Leareth doesn't immediately propose moving on to another activity... there is something they should talk about, at some point.  His thoughts soften - it's not a conversation he would normally consider it his place to start at all, and even now he's careful and a touch uncertain about it, but it is increasingly obvious that Leareth wants his people to bring up their concerns.

You said - it was only yesterday, wasn't it - that you shouldn't be making long-term decisions yet.  Do you think you're recovered enough, now?  Or if not, we might still talk about what the questions are.

(None of his mental words directly name the topic, but it's clear enough in his thoughts.  He said, yesterday, that he would be Leareth's - and he already is, in truth, but they should make the decision clearly, and he'd like to know how to do it right.)

...That's a good idea, and now seems like a very reasonable time to go through what the questions are. Leareth wouldn't say that he's fully recovered - Nayoki had a point, when she brought up that he's still significantly impaired - but he thinks he feels basically oriented enough to make decisions. And it seems important for Karal - for both of them - to have clarity on what exactly they're doing here. 

He's not sure what the important open questions are? It seems important to agree on...something like "what commitments are they making to each other" and "under what conditions would they need to reassess that"...but he's not sure how to put it more specifically than that in his thoughts. 

Karal is even less able to put his instinctive ideas in specific words, but he was definitely right that they needed to have some conversation about it.  The concept of this going two ways was, while not unfamiliar, not something he actually expected here (why is that?), and the idea of reassessment would have never occurred to him at all.  Or, that's not quite true - of course one can modify oaths or be released from them, or swear a term of service rather than an entire life, but he gets an unclear impression the Leareth means... something different from those things?...  Or possibly he means the same things but phrases them so differently that Karal can't be sure about it.

... If they start thinking about all the possible options, of which there must be nearly infinitely many of now that he's left his home and isn't dealing only with the traditions he grew up with, they'll never get to the end of it.  And there's no real reason to do it that way, is there.

What does he want?  It feels utterly clear, a bright instinct he's had nearly all his life, but he finds he cannot describe the underlying idea in useful words.  He tries to push it across as it is in his mind - a driving emotion, but one clearly directed, aligned with most of his soul toward something outside himself, and for reasons that feel real even though he can explain them even less than the emotion itself.  It's about... not even quite being trusted - that too, but more than that, about being relied on, about being someone his lord can use without the slightest doubt about his service or worry about its limits.  He thinks people, or at least the people he would offer his service to in the first place, will just be better if he gives them everything he can and trusts them to decide what to do with it, than if he tries to bargain and draw lines.  It feels important to him, that the people who are trying to do great things in the world should have someone fundamentally on their side, someone they can trust to be theirs no matter what choices they make.  It's less clear, even in the wordless intuitions only half coming across, why it's so important - something about trust and the way it shapes people.  It's not as if it's wrong to have limits in your service, but it's... not the same thing, then, not the thing Karal wants his life to be, not the thing he's shaped for.

I'm very bad at explaining this.  He sends a wry smile.  Please ask me questions, if that seems like it might help.  Or just tell me what you want, because whatever it is, I want you to have it.  It's possible that the way Karal naturally is is not quite the right shape to make Leareth feel-- safe in relying on him, yes, he thinks that's the closest he can come to it in words-- and he can do something different, at least to some extent, as long as it's in service of that goal.

Leareth also finds a lot of this hard to think about it words; he's neither surprised nor bothered that Karal is struggling a bit to convey what he means. 

He does think it's important to him that there's something here that goes both ways, even if their situation is fundamentally not symmetrical. It's - important to him to do right by Karal, or at least avoid wronging Karal by accident because he wasn't aware of a tradeoff or didn't think it through. He doesn't think that he'll feel comfortable unless he knows that he understands what would be wronging Karal, and can thus be confident that he's not doing it. 

And - he thinks it would be easier, from his side, to feel fully safe in relying on Karal, if there was some limit beyond which both of them agreed it would no longer be fair of him to demand Karal's loyalty and help. Maybe that line is somewhere absurdly far from reality - maybe the only things that would make Karal regret offering that loyalty in the first place are things that Leareth wouldn't do in the first place, like "torturing someone for no strategic gain" - but it feels important that pretty much everyone has some limit on how they're willing or able to act. 

It seems like maybe Karal is - doing the checking upfront, and deciding that he already knows enough about who Leareth is and what his goals are to commit his loyalty fully? But in that case, it feels important to Leareth to understand better what the decision-relevant factors were, and what would have hypothetically had to be different - about Leareth, about his plan - before Karal would have made a different choice. 

Everything Leareth is thinking is at the same time entirely reasonable and completely different from the way Karal is used to thinking about these things.  But it's good to try thinking in different ways, and learn something new about each other in the process.

Is what he's doing checking upfront that no order would ever cross a line?  No, it's not, that's obvious the moment he thinks about it.  He served Kadrich, and not because he was certain Kadrich could not conceivably have ordered pointless torture or some similarly awful thing - he didn't, but Karal can imagine it, and he would have done it.  He would have argued against it first, but... it feels important for some reason, that he'd do it anyway...  (Is it just that he wants that badly to completely belong to someone, that he'll agree to do evil in the service because it on some level gives him what he wants?  ...No, he doesn't think that's it, but it's increasingly difficult to try to pull out the loops of his instincts and inspect them in this sort of specific detail.  He does think there's something there that makes sense, but what is it...)

He wouldn't serve someone who wasn't worth it, is the obvious thought that comes back to him when he asks the question of himself.  And what does that mean, in words that carry some sort of logic instead of just the emotion?  He wouldn't serve someone if he didn't think this would make things better.  He would serve someone who might do awful things or might do great things, if he thought that by his service he would be making the awful things less and the great things more likely, and not otherwise - but having this influence, in the way in which he knows how to do it, requires the sort of commitment that will participate in the awful things, if they do still happen.

He does think many people are that way - perhaps the sort of people he's drawn to, especially.  That they respond to this sort of trust and commitment - that having someone like Karal, who would do awful things on their orders, and argue against it and suffer in the doing, makes them better.  But it's difficult to think through where that impression comes from.  Maybe it's just that otherwise the awful things will naturally be done by people who won't argue against them?  He feels that's not all of it, but he's not sure.  Some of it, he thinks, is that some people will not listen the same way to the arguments of anyone who isn't fully loyal to them (he knows Leareth isn't like that - Leareth would listen to an argument from anyone, and take it seriously), but that doesn't seem all of it either.  Mostly it's just that most people do, he thinks, feel safer if they have someone who is entirely loyal to them, and people who feel safe make better choices (not all of them, but many of them), and if their choices are important enough, this is worth it.

But if Leareth is not someone who will feel safer that way - and it makes sense that he isn't, Karal half-suspected it already from how he wanted Nayoki to argue with him, and that was part of what made him think it was important to have this conversation - then Karal can and will do things differently.  They can come up with lines, and he can commit to not crossing them.  (...That does bring up a practical concern.  Given the sorts of bizarre and convoluted things that happen in Leareth's life, how sure is he that Karal will be right about whether something is crossing a line rather than just looking like it?  He can ask for proof, and he knows Leareth wouldn't mind that, but what if there's no time or no way to prove something?  But that's probably a conversation to have later, once they've figured out the more fundamental level of where the lines are.)

Why he thinks Leareth is worth his loyalty is an even harder question - another single bright impulse that is going to be so difficult to untangle and put in any sort of logical order.  But it's increasingly clear that serving Leareth requires being able to find the logic underlying his instincts, and Karal does think the logic is there to be found.

First, Leareth is not lying to him.  He is just about fully confident of it, or as confident as he can be of anything in a situation as confusing as this - perhaps he's wrong about how Empathy works or about how human minds work or about whether what he saw in Leareth's mind wasn't a hallucination, but if he worries about things like this he will never be able to make any decisions at all.  But even if he hadn't had that strange Empathy-glimpse of the clarity of Leareth's mind and motivation, he would still be sure enough - not completely, and he cannot put numbers on it the way Leareth instinctively does, but much more sure than not - enough for a decision, even one as significant as this.  (Holding back, when you're sure enough, also carries a price - most of the time you cannot be entirely sure of anything, or cannot be sure quickly enough for the added certainty to outweigh the lost time.  And people value being seen and trusted, and will-- grow in a better direction?-- if you show them trust.  Although Leareth instead values meticulous verification, Karal did notice that, he adds fondly.)

Second, what Leareth wants is fundamentally a good thing.  That's... they agree on it, and it's obvious enough, once you let yourself think about it at all - the shining world of canal-Gates and cooperation and ingenuity and nobody starving.  Everything Karal has seen Leareth tried to build, for its own sake instead of as a tool for that greater goal, has been good, and where it failed, they agree on what the failure was and whether it was worth it.  They can read more records and be more sure, but Karal doesn't think it's at all likely that they'll find a major disagreement - and if they do find one, Leareth will welcome arguments about it, and in the end he expects one or the other of them will be convinced.

Third, yes, Leareth is doing awful things and planning worse ones in the service of his goal, but it's blindingly obvious that he doesn't want to - that if given better options he would take them, if given any scrap of hope of a better option he will spend decades investigating it.  Karal wants to serve someone who will do better things if he has more resources - the entire point of being the kind of person Karal is is to be a tool for someone who will do better for having him - and he doesn't think he's ever met anyone more like that than Leareth, who has almost completely shaped himself to transform resources into good outcomes as effectively as humanly possible, and then more effectively than that.

... Did all this answer at least some of Leareth's important questions?  He knows there were more of them, but there's only so much he can keep in his head at once.  He's starting to understand Leareth's note-taking habit, if all of his important decisions are endless branching questions like this.

And all of that makes sense, laid out - they definitely approach this from different angles, natively, and Leareth appreciates the effort Karal is putting in to make everything legible to him anyway. 

He should try to address all of that, but - first Leareth finds himself musing on the general concept of people doing better with more resources, and...how "feeling safe" is itself a kind of resource. People do do better - not just at achieving their goals, but at making the choices their best selves would endorse - when they feel safe. And he can see how for many people, having someone like Karal fully committed and loyal would give them a foundation of feeling-safe, from which they could grow in a better direction.  

...Leareth had never really considered that with regards to himself? He's poking at that thought, now, and - it's not that he doesn't think he would have space to grow into a better version of himself if he were safer. He absolutely would. Just - maybe he's just too deeply aware of all the ways the world isn't safe for one person's unconditional loyalty to help much. Maybe he's reluctant to put too much weight on it because two thousand years has taught him to be reluctant to put too much weight on anything. 

- also it's definitely true that the thing he would want from unconditional loyalty isn't a commitment to follow any order he gives? Nayoki hasn't committed to that. He's trying to do something very difficult, he's not immune to making mistakes. He feels better, not worse, to the extent that Nayoki is loyal to the goal he wants to achieve and not to him as a person. She is to a significant extent loyal to him personally, that's a normal way for people to work, but she uses her own judgement. Leareth knows that this is in some sense asking for something much bigger than just personal loyalty, but - that's what this project needs, and if it came down to a conflict between the project and Leareth, he knows where Nayoki would land. 

(There's a very quiet thought, in the background, that what would really make Leareth feel safer in an emotional sense, is if someone else existed who both shared his goals and had the power and skill to achieve them without him. He would feel so much less alone, and like he had so much more space to - just not do awful things - if it felt like he could afford to try and fail, because someone somewhere would eventually succeed. But - he's never, really, felt like that's what would happen.) 

Karal knows that he cannot make Leareth safe, or even help him very much, with his single lifetime.  Leareth is right not to put too much weight on his loyalty - it hurts to acknowledge, but it's obviously true - the entire world is too wrong to let Leareth put much weight on anything.  Karal wishes so much that Leareth could have more - more safety, more cooperation or even just communication, fewer senseless deaths, less being forced into the worst options - and he cannot give him any of these things, can barely give him anything at all.  Cannot be the person who could do all this on his own, he's quite sure, no matter how hard he might try.  (Although he will inevitably think, later, about what it would be like to really try - and that is a terrifying thought of a kind he had never contemplated before, like an infinite chasm opening up under his feet and demanding he learn how to fly.)

Of course nobody is really fundamentally safe, either in their own life or in their goals, but - most people can feel safe and benefit from the feeling even if it's not entirely true, and everything about Leareth as a person means that he cannot.  Karal knows how much his instincts aren't suited for all the ways Leareth is so unlike most people.  Some of those things he can fix, and some he can't.  He can't give him safety or even the feeling of it, but he can give him the loyalty he wants, to his project rather than to himself.  It's much easier for Karal to be loyal to a person than an idea, but... Leareth-right-now is a person, and if that loyalty might require fighting against him later, that is something Karal can commit to and keep his word on, no matter how much it would hurt.

Though, again, he should be very careful, because he can already imagine ways for the gods to manipulate him into only thinking this is what he needs to do.  It seems so unlikely that he could ever actually be right and Leareth be wrong.  But... he has already had the thought that he knew better than the gods about at least one thing, didn't he.  Surely there might be situations clear enough for him to think the same about Leareth, no matter how unlikely that seems.  He should talk to Nayoki about how she thinks about this, and what she'd need to be sure.  (Perhaps he can learn to fly at least a little.)

Is that what you want?  Not just lines not to cross, but for me to decide, myself, the right thing to do to fix the world, if I think I have to?  It feels ridiculous even to say.  But he remembers Leareth telling Nayoki it wasn't arrogance for her to think something not entirely unlike this.

...Yes. Pause. If that is something you can do without damaging yourself.

Honestly, Leareth thinks that a significant fraction of why he's worried about wronging Karal is that - it feels like the things he would ask for, if offered unconditional loyalty and commitment, are incredibly hard, and not at all the natural shape for most humans to be. It's hard for him to - be himself - and he's had eighteen hundred years to practice. And Nayoki gets to take breaks, in a way that feels hard to offer Karal even in principle. (Though another thing they should maybe talk about is whether Karal needs certain kinds of downtime or rejuvenating activities that Leareth wouldn't necessarily think of on his own.) 

Anyway. Leareth knows that he tends to have very high expectations of his people, and - he thinks he does reasonably well at not punishing anyone for being human, but - he's a little worried that Karal is trying to commit to being whatever Leareth needs, even if it turns out that this would require twisting himself into a shape that's actually bad for him? And he's not sure that he trusts himself to notice something like that in real time. 

I... don't know.  (The abyss, and trying to fly.)  He has never in his life felt so much like he was falling.

It doesn't feel right the way simple loyalty would, but... it doesn't feel wrong, either.  Just weightless and strange, and terrifying in the distant way of something utterly unexpected and only half understood.  Like being told the world might end.  (It did, once.)  But unexpected, incomprehensible, terrifying things do happen, and people deal with them, all the time.

I can try, I think, and... stop trying, if I shouldn't keep going.  Not because he would have the impulse to protect himself that way, but because Leareth wants him to.  If it worries Leareth, that he might harm him, then Karal will try not to let himself come to harm, and he thinks he can manage.  (If he trusts Leareth to catch him and let him rest, when he says he's fallen too far.  He does.)  He does understand how knowing someone else will protect himself is a kind of safety too, the way he feels safe knowing that Leareth will ignore him if he has something important to do.

Yes, it's going to be incredibly hard, and a strange shape to be, and he doesn't know whether he can, but - at the same time it's already obvious that he will. 

As long as you realize that I barely know what I'm doing.  He smiles a little, not truly worried.  He hasn't at all felt punished for being human, or gotten the impression that Leareth related to his other people that way.  And so far he's felt perfectly happy with the breaks he's gotten - although Leareth is of course right that it's been all of two days and he might turn out to have more needs than the occasional hour of talking to someone friendly about unimportant things.  Leareth has had eighteen hundred years to practice, and Karal should pay attention.  (Leareth might find it reassuring that Karal is paying attention, more than he would have before - this is a strange and hard thing, and it makes sense to be careful about trying it and to take care of himself in a way that he would have no inclination toward if he was doing something more familiar.)

(Leareth does appreciate and find it reassuring that Karal is paying attention! ...And, yes, part of why he's worried is that the thing he's doing, that his whole organization is doing, is - very different from the kind of world where Karal grew up, and the habits he learned there around living honorably without grinding himself down to nothing in the process might not be enough.) 

Leareth thinks that he's also going much more slowly and taking more breaks than he normally would, and has in general been much more - approaching everything with an unhurried attitude, because rushing won't help when he's still impaired and off-balance. He thinks he might have been a lot more impatient with Karal otherwise, though he's not sure exactly which things would have triggered impatience. 

...Also it's true that, so far, he's been careful with Karal. At first because things were fraught and he didn't want to damage their prospects for cooperation, and he's no longer worried about that, but he's still been putting substantial effort into being considerate, and - does think that, long term, he would prefer if that felt less necessary. Just knowing and being able to predict each other better will help by itself, but - for example, Leareth would like if he had more of an affordance to grab control if he wanted to interject something out loud in a conversation. He's been avoiding it because it's never seemed very important, so far, and because he remembered Karal finding it jarring before when he seized control without negotiating it first.

That's a small thing by itself, it's not very important and they could probably just get it down to a fraction-of-a-second wordless negotiation that didn't feel frictiony, but it does feel like an example of a wider category of things? That they should maybe talk about in general. 

That's easy, at least.  Karal smiles.  Yes, you've been surprisingly careful with me - it made sense to start with, but yes, please stop.  It's all right for me to find things jarring.  Though he doesn't remember what Leareth is talking about-- oh, in the dream.  That was a particularly difficult moment - he wouldn't act that way if Leareth grabbed control in a normal conversation, and even so it didn't do him harm.  They should practice that sort of thing more - he'll get used to it, and he's confident it'll be fine.

Leareth being impatient with him sounds potentially more painful, but... having it keep being painful would require the two of them to have a long-term disagreement about what is good or feasible, and he doesn't really expect that to happen?  And if he expected it to happen it'd seem like a less painful perspective in the first place.  Well, nothing to do but to find out.  I think you should be less careful, and I should err on the side of arguing with you when I don't like something, unless you tell me not to.  We'll get used to each other and sort out what works.

He wants Leareth to... just have him, and not feel like he has to worry about being careful with him, the way he doesn't worry about his cooperation any more.  (That feels entirely right, and Karal is glad.)  They'll have to see to what extent it's possible without making something worse, but he straightforwardly approves of the idea, and that mindset should help make it work.

Well. Leareth can try that, and if they run into problems, which problems come up will be informative. 

...Does Karal have anything else that he's apprehensive about, or would want to be different if it wasn't costly or inconvenient? 

Exactly - no doubt something will come up, and they'll learn from it once it does.  Karal expects it'll be fine.  He knows how to be someone's, and this is different but it's not that different.

He'd like to spend time outside at some point - he's not sure if the issue is sunlight as Leareth thought earlier, or just being outdoors, or both, but a walk in the tundra sometime this week would be good.  Everything else has been fine, but if Leareth is planning on being more busy and impatient then he should maybe think about what else might come up...  He does like talking to people about their lives and would like to get to do that most days if possible, but it doesn't need to be for candlemarks.  He's probably not going to like spending entire days on record-reading or math (and maybe particularly confusing magic, although most magic seems great) but he doesn't know whether that'll be the sort of dislike he can just deal with or something to be careful about.  He should get enough physical exercise to keep feeling like himself, but probably Leareth also thinks being in good shape is important.

They wanted to talk about what to do if that strange panic hits him again, at some point?  They dealt with well enough, he thinks, but he got the impression it might be something Leareth would be inclined to be impatient about, and he expects there are ways to make it go better.  And also ways it might have gone worse, if they were less lucky in their reactions.

(They can absolutely go for a walk out in the tundra tomorrow! Leareth would like to do it after he's had a chance to throw some magic around in a Work Room and make sure his reflexes for defending himself are in good shape, but he wants to do that soon anyway.) 

...And, yes, it's a good idea to think a bit about how to respond if the panic phenomenon happens again. Maybe even worth separately strategizing about what to do if they're somewhere safe - which is likely to be true for several weeks, and where Leareth mostly wants to focus on what responses will be most helpful for Karal, in hopes that this results in the panic getting less bad over time and ceasing to be a problem - and, also, what to do if it happens in a high-stakes context where they can't afford to just stop everything, and where Leareth probably couldn't spare too much thought to be attentive to Karal's needs. This - seems likely to mean that Leareth will respond by taking over, if he wasn't already in control, and dealing with the urgent situation before worrying about Karal's wellbeing. Does Karal have any ideas for what might make this less bad for him to experience? 

Yes, if they're in danger - or just doing something important that can't wait - Leareth should obviously do that, and Karal will live, he just might need more time afterward.  He's not sure what... sorts of things... could relevantly vary, in the situation where Leareth does whatever is necessary and doesn't think about him?  More sensory input of nearly any sort is better than less, definitely don't cut him off from anything, but he wouldn't expect that anyway.  Talk to him, if there's any attention to spare for that?  If there's something he could usefully do, try ordering him to do it - that seems like it might well work to snap him out of it, even if it's just 'be quiet and pay attention'.

Unless Leareth means after the high-stakes situation is over.  Then... It'll be about the same as what to do if they were safe in the first place, he's guessing, although he could be wrong?  The worst thing was that he didn't know where he was or what was happening - well, the worst thing was the moment when he thought he was back on the battlefield, but it seems unlikely for that to last long - either way, the thing to do about those is probably for Leareth to... make himself very obvious somehow?  Karal is not sure about the best way to accomplish that.

Leareth can definitely try (mentally) talking to Karal - he's not sure he can ad-lib helpfully reassuring things to say unless he has a script in advance, but he can at least talk through what he's doing, which might help Karal remember where he is. He - definitely would have been reluctant to try ordering Karal to do anything if he didn't have advance permission, but if Karal thinks it might actually help to be ordered to pay attention to something, he can try that? 

Does Karal think it would be worse if he were cut off from seeing some of Leareth's thoughts, separate from experiencing physical sensory input from their body and Othersenses? Does it depend much on whether the content of Leareth's thoughts is closely related to whatever set off a panic reaction in the first place? If Leareth were guessing without Karal's input, he probably would be inclined to tuck away thoughts that were closely related to something that had set off a very bad reaction, but given that he can ask for input ahead of time, he does want to check. ...And, come to think of it, whether there are any contexts where Karal might want to be cut off from some of their senses - for example, if Leareth has no choice but to keep engaging with someone or something that he's fairly sure is responsible for causing the panic in the first place?