"...that's going to be very time consuming unless it was done more sloppily than Mandos does it. Which isn't implausible. I'll get more efficient with practice, too, but even so it might make sense to prioritize if you have any idea what's in the gaps and what would be good to have back first."

"Lots of them I've patched around - forgot the names of everyone I knew...lot of interaction with my family is missing, perhaps because he was having trouble impersonating them well enough...most memories of being happy..."

"Factual information like names will be much quicker to recover than episodic memory."

"Yeah, that's a lot of the ones I've patched around. I hated not knowing it, felt like being completely blind."

"Would you like me to see if there's anything you haven't re-learned that I can uncover for you?"

"What does that entail?"

"Checking your factual memory for signs of tampering. I should be able to tell if there is any within an hour, sooner if there's a lot, and I'll have an idea of how long it would take me to fix shortly after I find any."

"Yeah, that sounds like a good place to start."

"Okay. It won't feel like anything and will in fact be rather boring, I can work with music on if that would make it easier to relax or anything."

"I'll be all right, thank you."

"Okay. Ready?"

"Yes."

And so she goes looking.

There's a lot of it. Peoples' favorite foods, peoples' favorite colors, achievements people are proud of, along with some names he wasn't able to recover. Lots of math. Lots of geography.

"Lots," she reports. "The good news is he's worse at this than Mandos."

Sweep sweep sweep the fuzz away.

It doesn't in fact feel like anything. He controls his heartrate and waits.

She works for about an hour and a half and - "We can break this up into sections if you have other things to do; I'd estimate it'd be another three to four hours to finish the factual stuff."

"You are much likelier to get bored than I."

"Okay, I can finish this part today then."

Sweep sweep sweep.

He closes his eyes and tries to feel it, which he can't.

And after another three hours and forty-seven minutes:

"That's all the factual memory tampering I can find. Episodic will take a lot longer and I do have a stamina limit on active use of arts, but if there's anything you'd like to talk about or think I should know that doesn't involve that I have the time."

"I don't know if the not caring about things is a consequence of mental tampering or just of having murdered so many innocent people that I'm burned out on having emotional experiences."

"...I'm not sure either, but we can try to find out. Do you have an idea of when it started?"

"Started, probably some time in Angband, because choices weren't, wanting things didn't matter...it definitely got worse during the war, though...I thought dying and coming back might fix it but I think it's just made me more functional around it..."

"Well, Mandos is a terrible therapist. Learned helplessness is definitely a known phenomenon but it getting worse during the war suggests it may be more complicated than that. What did being less functional around it look like?"