faderift | a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.

WHO: Ennaris Tavane & Stephen Strange, with Gwenaëlle Baudin
WHAT: Telepathy training
WHEN: Nowish
WHERE: The houseboat outside the Gallows
NOTES: None as of yet.

In terms of witnessing magical training, this isn’t the flashiest.

It isn’t cracking quarterstaffs in the training yard, it’s not flinging fireballs at each other, it’s something much quieter: Stephen Strange sitting cross-legged in the main parlour of his and Gwenaëlle’s shared home, hands loosely splayed against his knees and back straight in the recessed seating area. Relaxed, meditative. His eyes are closed and his mind a gentle hum along the mental link to Ennaris seated across from him, practicing her telepathy, while a cat behind them thrashes about in murderous circles fighting a ball of yarn, and somewhere in the further background, Gwenaëlle is puttering about.

He tunes it out for now, focusing instead on Ness’ mind.

It’s like any ordinary day featuring the couple comfortably working in their home, except that Ennaris has been invited into it for these sessions. The doctor is more guarded about the living space than Gwenaëlle is, but it fits the purposes for this lesson: it’s a more comfortable and private area for practicing mind-reading, perhaps too similar to blood magic for others’ comfort, and they can work on it discreetly.

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Once Ness asks for Hardie, puttering necessarily comes to an end; the only way to keep the dog where she wants him is for Gwenaëlle herself to remain in his easy line of sight with no visible intention of moving, lest he stand immediately after she does. He remains perceptibly tense, head jolting up when Ness speaks, that low-grade anxiety something to which he’s particularly sensitive,

Gwenaëlle clicks her tongue without looking up from her sewing, and he grumbles, and lowers his head again.

While Hardie has to sit where he can still keep an eye on Gwenaëlle, Stephen did the exact opposite: he can’t spot her or he’ll likely get distracted, his thoughts careening decidedly elsewhere.

So he sits facing straight forward. Even if he were to open his eyes, there’s nothing much of interest behind Ness besides curtains, windows, the slightly overcast winter day on Kirkwall harbour. With all his attention focused on the telepathic exercise instead, senses peeled for it, he can feel Ness’ presence nudging at the edges of his mind.

And part of their training has meant him getting more accustomed to this, too: lowering his hackles, dismantling his usual psychic defenses, letting others in for once. He’s opened the door to both Ness and Wanda, but the latter is so fraught that some of the reluctance had transferred to Ness by proxy, an innate wariness to let someone in (and let’s not linger too long on how telling that is, in general). Stephen’s been working on it. She’s been getting better and better at it.

Do you think it’s a matter of ability or of resistance? he asks, ruminative, before confessing: I’ve been wondering if part of the impediment might be my own fault. Life as the Sorcerer Supreme meant very much constructing mental walls and barriers to keep hostile psychic forces out.

A mix, obviously, she thinks at him, I've never done this before, and you're specifically trained to prevent me from doing it to you. But there's a benefit to starting with a challenge, it means I should have less trouble with others who don't have your training.

Though put that way, there's a complication she hadn't yet considered: if she's used to entering the thoughts of someone who can keep her out, there's every possibility she could use too much force on someone who has no such training, which... well, it sounds like something to avoid, anyway. She'll have to address that, and determine whether an anchor makes a difference, or templar training—

But that's for later. Ness inhales slowly, deliberately, and sets those thoughts aside. There's no point worrying about hypothetical damage she might do when she hasn't even managed to breach Stephen's defenses yet. Focus on the task before her, run before she walks, et cetera. She rolls her shoulders, gives Hardie a grateful scritch behind the ear, and clears her mind.

They've done this enough now that they've devised a strategy: it's difficult to engage with an abstract, so she must first make the force repelling her from Stephen's mind into something she can manipulate. She's tried a few different concepts—chicken wire, a fine mesh, cheesecloth, most recently a cell structure out of the Provost's microscope—and she's come closer and closer each time, been able to sense something beyond the barrier... But she hasn't been able to penetrate any of them.

Perhaps she's been imagining it incorrectly—his training as the Sorcerer Supreme, he'd said.

This time, Ness imagines the barrier surrounding Stephen's thoughts as one of the glyphs he uses to cast his spells, an intricate golden interweaving of geometry and spellscript. The glyph crackles and revolves in a vigilant dome around Stephen, and she wants to get inside it. It repels her touch when she applies any pressure to it... but she's not trying to punch through it, is she? She doesn't want to hurt Stephen—it'd be best if he didn't know she was there at all, if that's even possible. If she can slip past the Sorcerer Supreme, she can slip past anyone.

After a moment of thought, Ness pictures herself reaching out and, ever so gently, blotting out a line of script. A moment later, she erases a line from a square. She works from the inside out, instinctual—if Stephen created the glyph to protect himself, the foundation of the spell would be on the outside, the inside would be detail work—and pauses between each modification, waiting to see if she can read anything before she moves on to the next element.

And it starts, slowly, to work.

Stephen Strange’s mind is a puzzle-box of interlocking gears and cogs and nesting parts; the complicated inner workings of stubborn clockwork mechanism, all bound into a tightly-wrapped compartmentalised package. It takes time and careful, meticulous attention to unravel. He tries to hold the door open for her as best he can, but it’s also best to not make it too easy: not everyone is going to welcome the intrusion, and part of the training is learning how to do it on the fly. Sometimes she will indeed have to know how to wriggle her way past the defenses, delicately pick a lock, pry through a keyhole.

As Ness unpicks and erases the glyphs, it’s like hearing a muffled voice in the next room over, distant and quiet but getting louder. Someone turning the volume up on a record player. Spinning through a radio-dial, trying to hone in on the crackling reception, resolving into a voice, into his thoughts.

And it is, unsurprisingly, a litany of to-do lists still ticking over like a background hum in the doctor’s mind, some of it fading in and out of hearing. Antiseptic for Ennaris’ eventual ampu—— need to get the infirmary prepped for B——— write to — about giant spiders’ webs as bandages — —hink the houseboat’s almost out of coffee, wonder if I can send Guilfoyle to pick up some more without shitting my pants —

It’s more difficult than Gwenaëlle had imagined, sitting quietly while they practise — in theory, something familiar. In practise, different enough to be distracting, and her own restlessness is there in the way she shifts as if she can’t quite get comfortable enough to settle, frowning down at her sewing as she loses the thread of what she’s doing. The difference, of course, becomes obvious to her: the companionship of separate occupations has always been important, ordinary, easy—

but it’s quiet, a conversation occurring that she has no ability to join, and any interruption a distraction that defeats the purpose of the practise. The moments where she would speak off the cuff must be swallowed purposefully, leaving her hyperconscious of her usual propensity to dip in and out of her own stream of consciousness, vigilant against making a mess of it before they’ve done anything.

It’s impossible to tell if they’ve done anything, and it’s not only Ennaris’s anxiety that Hardie’s keyed into. Gwenaëlle’s restlessness in the silence distracts him, tracking every movement as she readjusts her sewing or shifts her weight from one side of the armchair to the other and then back again, as deliberate as Small Yngvi.

After the third time she must unpick the same stitch, she sets her sewing aside and leans her head back against her chair.

a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.

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