"Honey -"

"That'll be you, I take it," Iobel says when Aydanci flinches, "he thinks you're the soft touch in the room plus you have husband privileges and you might chase us away or give him a break where he can think really really slowly and have an easier time folding up into nothing again afterwards than if he has to go full speed. If he can go full speed. It's entirely possible his brain has atrophied and he will not feel nearly as smug about that if he calls it into service again instead of virtuously refusing to do so, especially if he ever concludes we're real, that would be so embarrassing if he were the slow kid in the crowd, especially since we aren't all that impressed with his tactical acumen. It is further embarrassing that this would ever occur to him, rationally it should be way down the priority list."

Iobel: also should be stared at with awe befitting an alt of the objectively best person in the world. (The golem's Lári's. Even if Aydanci tries chasing them from the room it's not going to happen.)

"What do you want."

"...what do we have, how do we best use the latter to get the former..."

"Up and at 'em. We don't care if you do any servantmaking and we throw the entire strategic scenario into such a tizzy that there's no way anything else you say can be reasonably deployed against you and yours in a vanilla Arda setting and your husband sounds like a lovely person who doesn't deserve this crap."

"Let me sleep on it."

"Don't make me laugh, you're already two-thirds of the way there. - Three-fifths. If you dream something incriminating you can self-destruct again, then, but your primary line of defense is not serving its purpose and you need to come up with something else anyway, preferably something that will be less hard on all these lovely people."

"What do you want."

"Peace, prosperity, alts with functioning brains. We're not going to set you on any relevant puzzles or even obliquely make you play Governor to poach your keen creative insights or anything like that but for fuck's sake get out of bed."

"Metaphorically. Also literally, if you like, but we're not going to insist on the literally getting out of bed. Looks cozy. For, you know, a few hours at a time, I think you've probably been really overdoing it."

"There's apparently a multiverse we can go explore, and I really can't think what the Enemy gains from that."

"I notice nobody's doing this to you," Kib says to Maitimo.

"I'm functional. They will presumably do this to me if they've got a way to convince me anything's real, but Cam says they haven't got that."

"Also apparently if we manage it he kills himself, which seems a waste."

Kib looks assessingly at Mitros, and is then interrupted by Aydanci hugging him, tight. He sighs and hugs back.

"Only once everything I can usefully do is done," he says.

Mitros is watching his wife with an expression of patient adoration and Cam with slightly more desirous admiration.

"We'll put you in touch with Maedhros," sighs Cam, "Loki will be annoyed with me if I carelessly drive one of you to suicide -"

"So will I," says Iobel, "presumably so especially will Kib if it's his one in particular..."

"Yes, yes."

"No, yours is not safe hundreds of miles away from you doing fine in your absence, get with the program."

"Doing fine in his absence? I had my human little sister in our factory twenty hours a day, waking warservants - do you know how hard it is to plan an assault on Angband entirely by choosing who to delegate its parts to and keeping morale up, being involved in the strategic planning would have been unwise -"

"Oh, he knows it's delusional, he just isn't in a place where optimizing for not being delusional seems like a good investment of the cesspit that is his mood."

"She's your sister? How'd you come by a human little sister?"