by nobody103
[Yes, that is the short of it.]
[And the other three things the attacker could do to the target?] Zorian asked.
[Well, the second possibility is that the attacker extracts information out of the target, either by reading their thoughts or probing their memories. Reading thoughts is the easiest option, of course, but often ineffective. Aranea, mages, and quite a few human civilians as well, have been learned to maintain certain discipline over their surface thoughts, making it hard to pluck information out of their minds that way. That leaves deep memory reading, and this is not nearly as easy as it sounds, as most people have quite a lot of memories to sift through and can sense when someone is rooting through their heads and resist. Even non-psychics can resist deep memory scans, if they're strong-willed and the psychic isn't very practiced in the skill…]
Zorian remained silent. He had raised the possibility of being taught memory manipulation plenty of times in the past, and she had always told him he wasn't ready yet. He couldn't imagine her answer would be any different now. At least it wasn't a flat out no, he supposed.
[The third and fourth options are what we aranea call deep and surface manipulations. Surface manipulations consist of temporary manipulations, such as fooling the senses or amplifying a particular emotion in the victim to produce a desired reaction. Deep manipulations, on the other hand, are more… permanent. They consist of things such as modifying someone's memories, blanking out entire sections of their life, instilling lasting compulsions or turning them into unaware sleeper agents. Deep techniques are what a lot of humans associate mind magic with, but they are actually rarely used. Such lasting mental alterations require the attacker to dive deep into the victim's mind and spend a lot of time tweaking things, making them hard and time-consuming to use. This is not something you use in a fight – this is something you do to a foe that has been decisively defeated and cannot strike back at you at all. Even among us aranea it is considered something of a dark art. Few of us are proficient in its use.]
Zorian sighed. "This is all leading up to an explanation about why you don't want to teach me any memory manipulation, isn't it?" he said out loud.
[Yes and no,] Mind Like Fire said carefully.
"So a no couched in flowery language," said Zorian derisively. "Man, that's the third refusal in a row. I'm going to have to find more webs to investigate…"
[Oh, have you went to other webs with this?] she asked, not in the least bothered by his little outburst. [Sounds like quite a story, you'll have to tell me about it later. But don't write us off yet. While it's true that we are not ready to let you root through our minds, even as practice, that doesn't mean we can't help prepare you for when you do eventually find an aranea brave enough to let you read her memories.]
"And you're going to do that by…?"
[The main problem you are facing when trying to read aranean minds is that our ways of perceiving the world are very different from yours. Our many eyes allow us to see the world in three different ways, only one of which – the one provided by our pair of big, forward-facing eyes – is in any way analogous to human vision. We can also sense vibrations through our legs, and our sense of touch is much more sophisticated than yours. It's how we can navigate through the tunnels so easily with no light to see by.]
"You can't see in the dark?" asked Zorian. Most Dungeon-dwellers could.
[No, we need at least a little light to see,] she said. [We do have excellent low-light vision though. But we're getting off track. What I'm trying to say is that even if you received access to an aranean memory, you probably would not be able to parse them. If you want to be able to read aranean memories, you first need to learn how to process the way we perceive the world. And that is where I can help you. I can let you tap into my senses and let you adjust to them. I can even package some of my more inconsequential memories into little packets and send them to you over the telepathic link to help you understand how to deal with memory packages.]
"Oh," Zorian said lamely. Yeah, that did sound useful. Somewhat mollified by her response, he switched back to telepathic communication. [So can we perhaps switch to that right now? I must admit I am getting thoroughly sick of combat drills. I know it's important to practice my mental shields, believe me, but I'm going to go crazy if this continues for much longer.]
[As a matter of fact, yes. I had wanted to wait with such instruction until you could actually break through my mental shields before starting you on that path, but you did succeed with that. Not in a way I had expected or planned for, but fair is fair. We shall start with surface manipulations, since you will need some proficiency with them before you can tap into someone's senses. How much did your other aranean teachers tell you about them?]
[Very little, other than the fact that they exist,] Zorian said. [But surface manipulations are basically mind control, yes? We covered those back in my mage academy. Only theoretically, with an emphasis on identifying the type of mind control and how to fight it, but still.]
[Summarize those lessons for me, please,] Mind Like Fire ordered. [I'd like to see what I'm working with.]
With a wave of his hands, Zorian created a glowing geometric diagram that was informally known as the 'mind control rectangle' among the students and whose official name escaped Zorian at the moment. It was something far too loquacious and complicated for what were basically four words arranged into a simple two-by-two grid – a rectangle divided into four smaller ones, each of the four major methods of manipulating people through mind magic assigned its own corner.
Domination, Suggestion
Puppeteering, Illusion
[Pretty,] Mind Like Fire deadpanned. [But I must confess I have never learned how to read human script, so you'll have to explain to me what that means.]
Ah. Right. He sometimes forgot that for all that aranea interacted with humans, they were still alien beings with a completely different culture. Ikosians had possessed an almost religious reverence for the written word, and had spread literacy to every place that had fallen under their domination, so literacy was near universal in places they'd once ruled over. Universal literacy most likely made it much easier to train as many people as possible into mages as well, thus providing tangible benefits for the policy. The aranea, on the other hand, had no such tradition, and probably couldn't use human-style writing effectively anyway. He knew that the Cyorian web had a number of aranea that could read and write, but most aranea probably had no need to master such skills.
[Domination and suggestion represent spells that enforce the caster's will upon the target,] said Zorian, pointing at the upper row of the rectangle. [Domination spells involve the caster outright ordering the target to do something and compelling them to do so against their will. Suggestion attempts to present the order as something the target wants on their own. They are will and situation based; depending on the sort of person you cast such spells at and the circumstances they are in, it might be completely impossible to affect them with this sort of mind magic. Most people will resist orders to kill themselves or their loved ones, for instance, and it is next to impossible to convince a patrolling soldier that you are not the person they are looking for if they had been given your picture or someone singled you out to them.] He pointed at the lower row of the rectangle. [Puppeteering and illusions, on the other hand, are not directly affected by the target's personality and circumstances. Puppeteering flat out usurps the target's control over their body and pilots it like a… well, puppet. Illusions manipulate the target's senses in some fashion. Neither can be resisted as such, although puppeteering has to overcome the target's magic resistance first and illusions can be detected and dispelled.]
Zorian waved his hands again and the illusion split in half, separating the rectangle into left and right halves – domination and puppeteering on the left side, suggestion and illusion on the right side.
[Domination and puppeteering are forceful methods,] he said. [The target knows they are being targeted by a spell,
and will usually be furious at the caster when it ends. As such, they are usually used in combat situations, against people who are clear enemies to you. Suggestion and illusion are subtle methods. The target doesn't automatically become aware they have been affected, and in fact the goal is for them to remain unaware as long as possible. They are generally used for criminal and espionage purposes.]
Compulsion spells on the top, hijacking spells on the bottom, forceful spells on the left and subtle spells on the right. Yup, he'd covered everything. He let the illusion evaporate into smoke and settled down to wait for Mind Like Fire's response.
[An interesting breakdown,] she said. [It has a sort of simplistic beauty to it. I'll have to remember that one. The reality is far more complex and less sharply defined… but we'll get to that later, when it's actually relevant. I was never very big on spending time on theory, truth be told. We've wasted enough time on it today and I'd like to get started on something productive.]
The resulting lesson was exceptionally painful, reminding Zorian of his initial lessons with her, several restarts in the past ago… and despite her insistence she was being no harder on him than she was on any of her other students, Zorian knew the sudden ferocity of her lessons was her revenge for catching her off guard.
On the bright side, she calmed down after a week of that. On the less bright side, he would have to piss her off like that on every subsequent restart as well, so he was looking at a week of painful headaches at the start of every restart.
Sometimes you just couldn't win.
✦ ✧ ✦
As it turned out, Mind Like Fire's statement about him being unable to understand aranean senses turned out to be not just correct, but a vast understatement. Even after a full month of practice, he couldn't make heads or tails of aranean senses. Even trying to limit his sensory tap into their vision alone left him dizzy and confused, and the less said of their sense of touch, the better. They had a rudimentary sense of taste on their leg hairs! They tasted the ground they walked on! Why for the love of all that was holy would a species need to have an ability like that!?
It also put Novelty's habit of touching everything, him included, in an entirely new and unsettling light…
Not that he'd learned nothing during the entire month. Mind Like Fire did manage to teach him how to affect the minds of others in minor ways. Some of these, like the ability to induce spasms and limb failure, he already knew how to produce - but not very consistently before he'd been lectured on the proper way of hijacking other people's nervous systems. Others, like inducing full body paralysis, lightly dampening or amplifying their emotions, subtly redirecting their attention away from things or inducing failure of one or more of their senses were wholly new to him. But while these things were all unquestionably useful, the total lack of progress on the one thing that he really had to master hit him hard.
In the end, he reluctantly decided to consult the Luminous Advocates for help. As much as they annoyed him, they probably had an answer to his problem. He managed to short-circuit the negotiations with them only two weeks into the restart by simply paying their ridiculous price. It required spending day after day on exploration of the lower levels of Knyazov Dveri's dungeon and selling everything of worth he had found there, but he did manage to talk them down to something halfway reasonable and then just pay them off.
According to the Luminous Advocates, his main problem was that he was basically trying to take on too big of a challenge at once. For one thing, he was trying to tap into the senses of another while still retaining his own, forcing his mind to process different perspectives at once. And no, sitting still with his eyes closed was not nearly enough to get around that. In order to deal with that issue, the Luminous Advocates taught him how to turn his mental abilities inwards and shut off one or more of his senses, leaving only the foreign sensory stream for his mind to process.
Their second suggestion was that he had to practice sensory tap on something easier first. Preferably his fellow humans, as their senses were closest to his own, but some of the more similar animals might also suffice. Only once he'd mastered the art of tapping into the senses of his fellow humans should he bother trying to tap into something as alien as an aranea.
When Zorian tried to do just that by tapping into the senses of a random passerby in a nearby town, he realized they were completely correct. He nearly collapsed from disorientation, even though he was only tapping into familiar human senses this time. It would be a long time before he could move on to something more exotic than a human, it seemed.
Which presented him with something of a problem. While Zorian's mental abilities were currently good enough that he didn't fear discovery every time he used them on some random civilian, he could hardly guarantee that he would never mess up and reveal to his target that he was messing with their heads. And frankly, you could never really be sure that your target really was 'a random civilian' – it was all too possible to step into the mind of some high-ranking mage good at blending in with the crowd, or to encounter a civilian trained to detect such intrusions. And the response of the mage guild to rogue mind mages was harsh. He didn't want a guild hunter team after him, even if the time loop would probably shield him from the worst of the consequences.
And that was without even considering the moral dimension of the whole thing. Picking on innocent people for the sake of personal training was not the road he wanted to go on, and dismissing their plight as irrelevant due to the time loop striked him as an unhealthy attitude to have. He might have justified the whole thing to himself if it was just a matter of tapping into their senses, since that was mostly harmless, but the Luminous Advocates made it clear this wasn't the only skill he would have to practice on his fellow humans to get right. He would encounter the exact same issues when he tried to master memory manipulation – even after accounting for their different senses, aranean minds were sufficiently different that he would need to practice on something more similar to himself before he tried to interpret their memories. And practicing memory probes was neither safe, harmless nor inconspicuous.
He needed an acceptable target.
✦ ✧ ✦
Zorian walked carefully through the streets of Cyoria, scanning the crowds for any signs of hostility with every sense he had available. He had a feeling his tension and nervousness was very obvious to people around him, but then again he was hardly the only person who was nervous. The random monsters welling up from the dungeon had spooked many a native, and there was a sense of tension in the city that hadn't been there the last time he'd been in the city.
This was his second recent visit to Cyoria, and it was just as uneventful as his first. He had even deliberately walked into some back alleys and more isolated parts of the city to see if Red Robe or one of his agents would confront him once he was out of the public eye, but no such things happened. He wasn't even confronted by a band of rough-looking men trying to steal his belongings, like it usually happened in the trashy adventure novels he read from time to time. Sighing, he twisted the top of the recall rod hanging off his belt and was promptly teleported to the outskirts of the city. The location was totally unremarkable – it wasn't lived in, and had been trapped to hell and back over the course of several weeks – Zorian could come and go as he pleased, but if the ward surrounding the area detected anyone other than him appearing inside, it would unleash a plethora of traps on the interloper – the nastiest and most lethal of traps that he had the capacity to make and install.
He repeated the action three times in quick succession, recalling himself to three additional, similar spots, walked off in a random direction for an hour or so and then finally teleported himself to his real destination.
Two days later, when no one tried to track him down to a small, remote village he'd chosen for his current base (mostly because it was in the middle of nowhere with nothing but fields of wheat for miles in any direction), he finally breathed a sigh of relief… and promptly started planning his next
foray into the city. Next time he was checking out the aranea ruins to see if Red Robe had put any tripwires there to alert him of intruders coming there.
When Zorian first got the idea of going back to Cyoria, he had immediately dismissed it as madness. He wasn't ready, and acting prematurely could potentially ruin everything. However, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Red Robe clearly wasn't trying to locate him anymore – if he had been doing so, Zorian wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as he had, he was quite sure of that. Why Red Robe felt no need to locate him, when he clearly wanted to get rid of any rival time travelers, Zorian did not know. He'd feared that the other time traveler had maybe placed tripwires in Cyoria to alert him when he came back, but even that seemed increasingly unlikely at this point – Zorian had been all over Cyoria during his two brief forays into the city, even in parts of the Academy, and nothing of note happened.
That was important, partly because Zorian felt like he was going a little crazy and desperately wanted to see some familiar faces, at least for a short while, but also because Cyoria held some perfect targets for him to practice his growing mind magic skills on. The matriarch solved at least a part of the time loop's mystery by ferreting out information out of the heads of Ibasan invaders and their supporters. Why couldn't Zorian do the same? He would not only he be advancing his abilities in preparations of opening the matriarch's memory package, he would also be tackling the mystery of the time loop from another direction. Two birds with one stone.
He wasn't going to move in back into the city yet. He would continue testing the place for a while still. Try to spend a whole week in there, show up for a class or two. But if Red Robe's response turned out to be as non-existent as this?
His long exile from the city was about to end.
✦ ✧ ✦
Zorian spent the next three restarts alternating between Mind Like Fire's lessons and making forays into Cyoria. He was never attacked while in Cyoria, not even when he combed through the aranean corpse-filled settlement in one of the restarts. A part of him felt that was highly suspicious, but ultimately it didn't keep him away from the place.