"I don't have experiences, such as worry, but did not think it was likely that you would deliberately cause another disaster and am still in progress on assuring that no accidents are in the offing."

It’s fascinating that the subparts of Sing - and maybe the entirety of Sing? - apparently “don’t have experiences” despite having intelligence. That isn’t how Velgarth gods work, and even limited avatars like the Shadow-Lover are - closer to the kind of thing the Groveborn are than to…whatever this is.

Leareth isn’t sure how Sing plans to prevent accidents. It’s almost certainly unnecessary and definitely pointless to be scared about it, and he - in fact mostly isn’t? Just tired and sad and something else harder to put into words.

Oh, 'I don't have experiences' is a good answer to the question he couldn't figure out how to ask!  Maybe that's why it's so strange to talk to.  He wants to ask Leareth more about what his limited god-avatars were going to be like, later.

"I'm glad. And, ah, what accidents?"  He doesn't, with a moment to think about it, doubt that there were some plans Leareth had set up somewhere that might explode on their own, but they hadn't had time to catch up on everything, so he might not even know where.  "What are you doing about them, and can we help?"

...Maybe he shouldn't have offered, given how tired Leareth feels about all this?  But it was such an automatic impulse.  And, on second thought - they have so many people.  Probably someone else will be happy enough to do whatever it is, if there's anything they can do at all.

"It would possibly be helpful to read your magical library. Some of the details may at this early stage be dangerous to reveal."

Can it read your magical library?  It seems fine to me. 

...Do you know what it's talking about?

Yes, of course. Leareth was planning to share that anyway, but he supposes he wasn’t incredibly detailed when he told Nayoki to share everything useful for prioritizing problems in need of fixing, and she might not have considered his magical library the most important piece given that it’s not clear Sing operates using magic as they know it.

….He’s pretty unsure what Sing is talking about! It could be a lot of things, honestly. Cataclysm damage is one guess, but Leareth is arguably less of an expert than the Tayledras. Maybe something the Eastern Empire was working on is a bad idea and needs to be shut down carefully and securely before it explodes? That’s certainly happened before in their history…

"Yes, of course."  (But the 'of course' comes after enough of a pause for an otherworldly intelligence to notice - and Karal still doesn't know if it knows who he is, or if that's the sort of thing that matters to it.)

"Nayoki, could you get someone to find another flying thing and help it get started? Might as well not delay that."  Maybe move the books to somewhere Leareth doesn't sleep, he adds mentally, since she's probably Thoughtsensing him given the circumstances.

"So... does 'dangerous to reveal' mean you think the information might get out, or that I might do something awful with it, or that I might do something stupid with it, or do you just... not think in human terms and so there's not much difference to you between those options...?  I don't want you to tell me the dangerous thing, I've heard enough good things about you that I believe you when you say you shouldn't, I just keep having trouble talking to you and I don't know where my problem is."

"Sorry! My counterpart in Sing's original world has more training data to work with and is probably a lot easier to talk to for the people it's used to, but I'm new. Those possibilities are all too substantial to risk considering the scale of the possible disasters."

Leareth does actually want to know the dangerous thing! He doesn’t endorse trying to learn it, it’s coming entirely from a deep-worn groove of habit, that dangerous things he doesn’t see coming mean he’s more likely to make mistakes that hurt a lot of people, or else someone or Someone else will use it against him… It’s not worth trying to protect against that when Sing is here and actively disrecommending it, but that still doesn’t sit comfortably.

- and Sing is doing remarkably well for operating in a world where it’s not yet fully oriented, but that does seem pretty non-ideal! And reminds him that - 

Vkandis wanted Sing to explain - me - so that the gods would find my effect on Foresight less noisy, he thinks to Karal. But unless it is being very evasive about how much it knows, I am not sure how well it can predict me yet. 

They should maybe try to do something about that? It feels not just difficult and stressful, it’s also blankness-inducing again, his mind half bouncing away from thinking through how that would even work or what it might involve. 

"Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were new."  Help, now he feels bad for the baby intelligence, which... doesn't have experiences, right.  "That makes sense."  He's probably thinking about it wrong, but the new information still makes it endearing that it just told him there's a too-substantial possibility that he's stupid or evil.  (And of course it's right to be cautious about those things.)

Yes - now I finally feel like I have some idea what I'm talking to and why it sounded so disconcerting, so I can maybe do a decent job of telling it things.  He doubts anything they manage will be good enough for Foresight, which seems like a lost cause anyway given all of Sing's own changes to the world, but whatever other prediction method it's using and sharing with the gods, it would be good to give it enough information for it to work well.

... If you really want it to be able to predict you, we should just let it read all your notes.  He's not sure whether that's a good idea, but possibly?  (And it wouldn't just help to predict Leareth, it'd help predict how the world works, from a perspective that can't be find in any library in the world.)  Well, he'll start with having the conversation, and they can decide after.

"All right, now that I know why you sounded odd to me in the first place, let me try that bit of the conversation again. I asked what you knew about me, and you didn't answer with any specific information - which was surprising, because I know you asked Vkandis to answer mortal questions and He told me everything I wanted to know.  (For which I'm grateful to both of you.)  So probably what's going on is that you're new and I wasn't being clear enough.  Can I just ask you some specific questions to get at the sort of thing I meant?

...I'm going to tell you all the answers regardless, but you don't have experiences and I do, so I thought I could let myself be curious for a minute, if that's all right."

(He hopes Leareth doesn't mind this entire prelude.  It'll make it easier for Karal to have the rest of this conversation, if he feels like he knows what's going on, and hopefully Karal feeling more comfortable is helping Leareth too, at least a little?  It's a little difficult to pay full attention to what Leareth's mind is trying to avoid while talking to the strange little flying thing at the same time, so he apologizes if he's not guessing very well.)

"Go right ahead!"

Leareth thinks that Karal is handling this well, and - aaaaa - yes it’s probably an efficient solution for them to just give Sing his personal memory-record notes on his past lives and work. Maybe by the end of this conversation that will seem less - he’s not even sure what - less like letting even the tattered and probably illusory remnants of control he still has over his own life slip away? It doesn’t seem helpful to think of it that way, and yet.

Mental hug.  That seems... an unhelpful way to think of it, Karal genuinely doesn't think Sing wants to control their life, but on second thought it makes perfect sense that Leareth's instincts are refusing to accept the idea that someone could do that and just won't.  Not much to do about that except giving it time to sink in.

In the meantime, questions, so they can maybe finally find out whether it was too late to worry about any of this from the moment they started.

"What were all of us here working on until today, and why were we doing it?  When did you find out?"

"What's my name?"  (Terribly self-absorbed of him, but he is curious if it knows there are two of them in here, and he doesn't know how else to ask that question without giving away the answer. Well, probably not giving away the answer isn't even important here, and he's halfway doing it anyway, but it'd just feel odd to drop all his human conversation habits - he wouldn't know what to replace them with.)

"If I said you can tell Vanyel whether Leareth's, ah, 'privately evil', what would you tell him? Or do you not know yet?"

"My top guess is that you were intending to construct an artificial god. I'm not sure exactly what you want to know when you ask when I found out. I put together pieces of evidence that inform my understanding of the world piecemeal and virtually never hold any given fact too strongly. The hypothesis that someone might be working on that emerged quite early in Sing's first-pass assessment of the situation, and that it was Leareth who was doing that or something of comparable magnitude emerged early in its first exchanges with the gods.

"I think you are most likely Karal.

"I would wait for Leareth to confirm because I do not have privileged access to what your arrangement with your headmate is."

All of that is interesting enough that Leareth is mostly not thinking to be anxious about it! The emphasis on privacy is - it's not that it doesn't make sense, as a thing people would need and benefit from when living in a world being watched over by an incredibly powerful benevolent something-like-an-artificial-god, but there's an emphasis and framing that keeps being a little surprising. Maybe it's an artifact of the other world's society, either the way it evolved after Sing had existed for a while or the way it was already. 

He's also intensely curious what pieces of evidence Sing was putting together when, on its initial assessment of Velgarth as a world and - it sounds like - before it knew anything about Leareth as a person and before it had communicated with the existing gods, it seemed like a project someone might be working on in general. Leareth is fairly sure no one would be working on it if he wasn't! And he didn't think he had left a lot of hints lying around outside of his records caches and the knowledge held by his mages and researchers, nearly all of whom have the standard secrecy compulsions. Sing wouldn't need very many hints, of course, but it's still impressive and he still wants to know. 

- he nudges Karal gently for control.

"This is Leareth. You are correct that it was Karal speaking before." He sounds mostly calm, though he's not actively trying to hide any signs of stress, it seems Sing's agent will strictly do better here with more information and he does, at this point, more or less believe that it doing better is also better for him. "I - need to think about what information I would want passed to Vanyel, but I admit I am curious what the answer would be. ...And very curious why 'someone working on an artificial god' was a salient hypothesis immediately. It took almost eight hundred years for me to think of it." 

"It's possible with the local magic system and theoretically achievable amounts of power. From the perspective of a sufficiently ambitious human it would be an appealing possible angle of leverage.

"I don't have a very robust definition of 'evil'. If you authorized me to tell Vanyel whatever he wanted I would probably break down the question into smaller parts, such as that I am fairly confident you have killed innocent people but exclusively for instrumental purposes rather than recreational ones or through carelessness."

Leareth actually finds himself wanting to smile slightly. "To be fair to Vanyel, I think he does know that 'evil' is underspecified, and would have asked a more specific question if he were under less stress." 

- and back to Karal, if Karal wants, because that was enough talking for the moment. ...Though maybe he should explicitly tell Sing's agent that it's all right for Karal to speak for him, since apparently otherwise it wants to check everything, which it's not that he doesn't appreciate the - not mindset, Sing apparently doesn't have a "mind" in the usual sense - the approach that hints at - it's just that it's very tiring. "I am all right with Karal speaking for me." 

(It's interesting that Sing apparently found it sufficiently likely that a sufficiently ambitious - and capable - human would exist in Velgarth. There's something oddly reassuring about the view of the world that implies, it's - ohhh, it's in a sense the opposite of the Velgarth gods, isn't it. Who Leareth thinks can't even directly perceive human ambition, just the fact that it throws around noise in their primary sensory modality.) 

Karal is glad Leareth felt like talking - and that he felt like asking questions instead of just giving it the one confirmation it asked for - but he'd happy enough to switch back, especially now that he finally feels like he knows what's going on.  (What's going on is that they could have never done anything from the start - but also this is not at all the situation they were trying to prevent, so that doesn't really mean anything about whether what they were doing was worth it.)

He does smile. "Headmate, is that what the thing we are is called?  Hello, and thank you for the answers.  Our arrangement is that I do what he wants," he doesn't think to clarify that he's happy with this, but it doesn't take much skill in reading human expressions to tell, "and I'm doing most of the talking because he understandably finds you terrifying.  I don't think you can do much about that - we approve of everything about you, as far as I can tell, but you did give us a very stressful time trying to find that out, and Leareth is... not used to being safe."  (Yes, he's talking at it as if it was human and telling it things it no doubt mostly already knows, but it seems better than erring in the other direction.)

"So - is there much left, really, since you apparently know more or less everything?  Is there anything else it would help you to know, or any reassurance you think the gods still need about us?"

And do you actually want Vanyel to get his answer?  I think it'd be good for both of you.  Although telling him 'anything he wanted' might be a little much, and I'm not sure how to draw a sensible boundary.

Letting it read your notes might still be good, but - you can decide later, I think.  It knows so much as it is, I don't think it'll make an urgent difference.  Unless you're sure already.  You're right that it seems... very much on our side.

There are of course a hundred more things it would be interesting to ask Sing, but they should process this conversation, and sleep, and it seems like they'll be able to repeat it later whenever they like.

"My areas of greatest uncertainty are still magic and gods, as Sing's source world doesn't have either. It hasn't had enough time or narrow enough error bars to conduct all informative experiments and more data in any format would help make me and it confident enough to move forward."

No, they couldn’t have done anything. That - was probably more likely than not even in the scenario where Sing wasn’t aligned with humanity’s interests, but Leareth’s focus all along had been on the possible worlds - which were maybe a small subset of the likely ones - where any of his decisions in those terrifying two candlemarks mattered. 

(And not just mattered in the sense where he could probably have caused a lot of damage in that brief window, that would be at least inconvenient and expensive to repair, if he were actually “evil”. …Why is he even thinking about that.)

He thinks it’s possible that Sing still has a lot to learn about him as a person, that his notes would uncover. Its sources are the present - his operations, the “hearsay” - and the gods, who don’t understand Leareth. He’s the kind of person who would have invaded a kingdom and killed ten million people - and what a thing, for Sing to describe that simply as “theoretically achievable amounts of power” - to create an artificial god, but - that doesn’t necessary fully pin down who he is, even to Sing. Who, unless it was bring misleading on purpose, wasn’t even 100% confident which of him or Karal was speaking, before.

It’s not urgent, though, and - he thinks it will be good for him, for his “sense of agency” however much of an illusion that is, to go away and process and make that decision thoughtfully.

Sing can and should have all of his notes on matters related to the gods, though. (And he finds that he’s suddenly desperate to have Sing’s assessment of his specifications for the new god. Would it have worked, if he had been somehow pushed to move ahead with the plan now instead of in a few decades after a few more rounds of sanity-checking by his researchers…)

And Vanyel… There is so much he still does not know. Nothing about the plan to create a god, or the cost. Nothing about Leareth’s role in the Cataclysm; that history is lost in Valdemar, and Leareth did mention Urtho once, but it wouldn’t have meant anything to Vanyel.

(A surprisingly strong spike of pain and grief and something like bitterness, when Leareth thinks Urtho’s name. It’s not Sing’s fault that it arrived now instead of two thousand years ago, and it’s certainly better than the hypothetical where it arrived in twenty or fifty years, but his emotions still want to demand why didn’t it come sooner…)

…He wants to explain it to Vanyel himself, he thinks, and suspects Vanyel would also prefer that. So - maybe they can ask Sing to say just enough that Vanyel will be willing to speak to Leareth face to face, and trust that what he says is the truth. I have never lied to him, but he does not know that.

An unaligned Sing wouldn't have gotten all the information from the gods, probably, unless it was very good at lying to them?  So it would have been slower, although maybe not slower enough.  But yes, of course there wasn't much point in thinking about the possibilities where nothing they did mattered.  (Not something that Karal would have realized, let alone found so natural to think about, before he met Leareth.)

"You'll have everything we have about magic and the gods. If it would help to have people conduct experiments, I expect we could do that too. Will you please tell us whether the god-design would have worked, once you've seen that? It wasn't finished, but still."

Gods, true, Vanyel doesn't really know anything, and definitely shouldn't find out from anyone but Leareth about his past or his plans.  What, then?

"I'd... like you to tell Vanyel that Leareth-- 'isn't evil' isn't a good way to think about it at all, you're right-- that he's trustworthy, that he hasn't lied to him and isn't going to, that he wanted to make the world better the same way you do, even when he had to kill people for it.  Do you actually know these things?"  He has no idea whether it can tell he's not lying, or how much it already knew about Leareth as a person rather than just his actions.  It doesn't seem to think in those terms very much.  "I want Vanyel to... know enough about Leareth's character that they can talk without worrying about lies, but I don't want him to find out from you about Leareth's history or what he was planning or all the other personal details of his life.  I'm not sure how to describe to you what that means about what you should and shouldn't tell him," since 'has he killed people and why' is also a personal detail of a person's life, in a rather important sense, and Sing seems much more comfortable talking about facts of that sort than about someone's personality directly.  He doesn't mind it telling Vanyel for what general sorts of reasons Leareth has killed people, he just doesn't know how to draw the line between that and more private information.  Maybe Sing does.  "Or do you know what I mean already?"

(He sees Leareth's pain, and can't - well, shouldn't - pay enough attention to it right now to react with more than a half-distracted feeling of empathy.  They should be alone to talk about it all soon enough.  But it was awful, and it makes sense for it to hurt.)

"I think I understand. Do you want me to tell him right now through another one of my flying things?"

He pauses long enough for Leareth to have a last-minute objection, but doesn't ask him to confirm the decision, since it seems clear enough.  "Yes, please. ...I'd be curious to know what it is you'll tell him, but we can ask him about that."

It only occurs to him now that they'll almost certainly have a Vanyel dream tonight, and so yes, it's very good that they did this now instead of tomorrow.  They would've probably muddled through somehow, but it'll be so much easier if they can finally trust each other. 

...Not that Karal himself has spoken to Vanyel more than once, but he's read so many of the dream-notes now, and seen so many of Leareth's thoughts, that it'll be a relief for him as well, to see the two of them really talk.

And... that's it, he thinks?  "I wish you all luck with preventing accidents. And everything else you're doing."  And Nayoki can Gate it back out, and Gate them back home, and organize the notes-sharing so that Leareth doesn't have to deal with it.

(And so Karal doesn't have to deal with it either, maybe.  He wouldn't mind, but he can tell that he's in that state where he's not thinking about some things in order to push through everything that needs doing, and he should perhaps at some point stop that.  If Nayoki is also feeling that way, then he apologizes, and probably she can find someone else who's has an easier day to do the remaining things?)

Nayoki is not feeling that way! She's still unsure if the weird complicated feelings that Leareth and at least a quarter of his staff are busy having in all directions will also catch up with her later, but in any case she’s not in the mood for that right now.

In Haven, Vanyel is now finally in a meeting with the King and Senior Circle. He would much rather have waited to have any of the conversation about Leareth, and they’re - still talking around it, really, not exactly having it. At least Taver backed him and Yfandes on the part where they decided against telling anyone, but it’s fairly obvious that Randi is still bothered by it.