He is, like, three moves off from this absurdly clever play that Iobel will admire and Cricket will probably hiss at. But it's not as if he'll forget it. "Sure, we'll hear him."

So they go see the petitioner, who is an older fellow, no easily recognizable ethnicity, doesn't even speak Marlese because he's from the far south and is pleased to hear he doesn't need to wait for a translator -

- clarifies that he's not actually from the far south, he's from another world, he usually doesn't tell people this because nobody believes him but they say the monarchs of Marlatia get their strange powers from afar -

"Can you describe the world you're from?"

He can! It has humans, but... differently. He was alarmed when he got here to learn that humans breed the way animals do; in his world it's different. There are two big continents and servantmakers and then there was this... snake thing... which is not normally a feature of his native world... he probably sounds crazy.

"No, not particularly," Iobel assures him.

"And you arrived here? When was this?"

"Sixty... ish... years ago?" he says. "I think days are shorter here, I'm not sure exactly... it was a long time ago..."

"Do you want to go back?" 'this person's native dimension' should be enough targeting for Loki's spell...

"I have a home here, now, but I would like to see the place again and know what became of it..."

Allspeak off. "...think we should just head over, or should we call one of your less squishable alts?" he murmurs to the Queen.

"Place sounds safe, but maybe the snake monster heralded an apocalypse, probably better to send Cam."

Allspeak back on. "Please stay for lunch while we do some magic to determine if it's safe to go visit your world," he says, and then writes 'attn.: Cam, we have an accidental interdimensional visitor from another human planet, weird one, come say hi' on a piece of paper, and then has some people bring them all lunch.

Cam shows up mid-lunchtime. "Accidental? Like Elspeth?"

"Not quite. Unprecedented snake monster, showed up, portaled him to Hex, he heard we had strange powers and came to see if we could let him visit the place. Decades ago."

"Also, on his home world, babies appear in the wild and starve to death unless storks fetch them."

"Storks? You've got to be fucking with me."

Allspeak back on - "Sir, can you explain to Cam about the storks?"

"Storks are a kind of servant, I don't remember which kind, it was so long ago. They're hollow, and they go around looking for babies and putting them in their hollows and bringing them to creches."

"...I suppose this isn't literally more of a coincidence than vampires," Cam mutters. "Okay, can you describe the place you were when you got snake monstered? I'll go check it out, make sure it's all right to bring people there."

And eventually Cam has enough to go on, and he (in a snazzy leather coat so he will merely look outlandishly dressed, not outlandishly appendaged) goes.

It's... a town. With little robots running around, but otherwise not too high-tech. Somebody is riding an ostrich.

There are beautifully painted signs advertising "This way to Little Valinor" and informational flyers under them about Our Friends The Elves and what the fuck.

Cam strolls towards Little Valinor, reading one of the infosheets.

Little Valinor: very pretty! The little robots running around are also pretty! There is an Elf at the elaborate gates of the entrance who tells him the visitor's fee in local currency.

"How," says Cam in Quenya, "did there come to be a Little Valinor here?"

"...Akibel? I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you!" It's definitely Akibel, he's just older - "are the portals open again?"

"I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about and my name is Cam."

He blinks. "Um. Welcome to Little Valinor! Sixty years ago, the Valar opened this portal between our world and theirs, so that Elves and humans could live together and help each other! Elves can't servantmake, so humans make them shines and automata and golems, and Elves produce chassis for public health projects and restaurants so no one goes hungry and try to raise enough money to fund all the storks so babies stop dying, because to Elven cultural sensitivities babies starving in the wild is very upsetting! Ten years later the Valar had to close the portals, but some of us stayed, and we've carried on the same mission.

And you look exactly like Akibel, the human who spearheaded the whole project and who chose to stay in Valinor when the portals were closed."

"I see. It's very nice to meet you," says Cam, "and I would like to meet him too - he's still in Large Valinor? Why did the portals close?"

"The Enemy smuggled human babies through them to use as servantmakers in his war with Valinor. Didn't seem safe for either world to leave them open."

"...ah. And you haven't heard back since?"

"No."

"I see. Thank you."

Cam returns to Marlatia. "Seems safe! Also there is an Elf neighborhood there called Little Valinor and I look like the guy who spearheaded the project to get the worlds in contact before the Valar closed the portals! They have not had word recently and the Enemy may be an ongoing concern!"

"Complete works of your presumed alt?"

"Ah-huh." He shuffles through them. "...Buncha notes... his handwriting suddenly gets worse and then improves again... huge temporal gap, here, he's written a page and a half in the last several years..."

"...what? I mean, if he got a way to do the notetaking functionality without literally writing anything down - or for that matter if he were prevented from writing - why would there be even a page and a half in the gap -?"

"Do we have anything we can do about the Enemy in this Arda - if it's outside the range of the only weapon that's successfully killed him-"

"...teleport the entire planet away without him on it? Might want to reasonableize-and-warn the Valar first in case they need to prep the flatness of the planet for transit first."

"Might be able to follow..."

"Take it two hops?"

"I'd worry the Enemy just jumps to Stork Planet, but I suppose we could move them too."

"And he hasn't jumped to Stork Planet already - and Elentári's never went to Edda -"

"And the Valar closed the portals presumably because they thought it'd make a difference. Okay. You want to go in alone or fetch Loki or fetch an Elf alt?"

"I think I'll go scope the place alone and come back for Elspeth and anyone else who seems called-for after I've sussed it out; Loki's asleep."

"Have fun. Dismiss and resummon if we don't hear from you or get a message in a week?"

"Sensible precaution."

And he writes up a note for Space Arda demonic distribution and hops through Little Valinor to, well, Large Valinor.

It is sunlit and stunningly beautiful. There's a white city on a hilltop a few miles away.

Yup that's a Valinor.

Cam runs checks for local alts, narrows them down, teleports to the continent they're on - not Beleriand, hmm - narrows them down a bit farther, hops closer, strolls over to the city.

It is still being constructed, by robots, but large areas are already completed. People turn and stare. Someone mutters to one of the golems and it answers him and then they tense considerably and then there are a couple dozen robots with pointy sticks marching at Cam.

"Uh, hello? I come in peace?"

A human girl steps out from behind them. "Stop," she says, warily, to the robots, and they do. "Hi. Why are you impersonating Kib, and how in Arda'd you think you'd get away with it?"

Blink. "I'm not impersonating anybody, this is just what I look like. If you would prefer a representative who doesn't look like me I can go get one, but they will be somewhat less even-keeled about the pointy sticks."

"Representative of what?"

Vague gesture. "Sorry, I don't actually have a generic introductory spiel or anything, should really get on that - you already know there's other worlds, though, right? There's lots of them. Some of them have duplicates of people in them. You I don't recognize, but unless we just coincidentally look really similar I'm guessing Kib's one of my alts. The others are all girls so far, though, won't look like they're trying to impersonate him..."

"Oh.

Okay.

It's only a little bit that you look like you're trying to impersonate him and more that Aydanci will probably be in unspeakable pain all week. More than he is all the time, I mean. I'll ask him if he wants to meet you anyway. Do any of the other worlds still have an Enemy problem because we murdered the fuck out of ours."

"Oh, congratulations! We've - well, one of my alts in particular - killed two and a third of them got away, but if your method of Enemy-killing is portable it may come in handy, some stuff doesn't work in some worlds. Who's Aydanci?"

"Kib's husband. Friend of mine. It - they almost got Kib back, once, and then they lost him again and it crushed him and it might be kind of weird for him, seeing you, walking around and happy and okay."

"I can get one of the girl ones but you need to not brandish pointy sticks at her, the reason I do the scouting is because I'm indestructible and we've got slightly higher safety requirements for everybody else."

"Do the girl ones look like Aly, because that. Wouldn't help either. Hey, can someone osanwe Aydanci and ask him? And also the King?"

"...I don't know what Aly looks like? Who's Aly?"

"Humans reincarnate! Well, only some of them, possibly only Kib and Aydanci, my guess is that it has something to do with Kib having invented storks but we don't really have a good explanation. And we don't know for sure if it'd happen again or we'd have killed Kib. But Kib used to be a girl, named Aly, and then she died, and a few days later a stork brought Kib to a crèche and he had the same personality and then he started getting dreams about being Aly. And Aly'd died young and had a husband who she loved very much, and that husband was Aydanci. So Kib went and found Aydanci and then the Valar let them be married even though they're both boys because they'd been married before, and they were happy.

And then the Enemy killed Aydanci, and Kib sent the storks to find Aydanci's reincarnation and bring him, and the new Aydanci and I were the same age and grew up as friends and stuff and we had to do all the servantmaking because Elves can't servantmake, and then Aydanci started getting dreams about his past life and fell in love with Kib, and they were married again, and then the Enemy got Kib and tortured him and he doesn't scream in his sleep like he did the first ten years but he's. Not. He's gone."

"Well, shit. Uh, I've got a picture -" He pulls up a picture of himself and Loki and Iobel - "This one's out of date, we've got a new alt, same face as the other girls but paler and gold eyes, Iobel's height not Loki's - Iobel's the one with the cat - Aly look like them?"

"...don't think so, but I should ask the King, he'd probably know and probably not be super sad if it turns out it is - Nelyooooo -"

And he steps out. He looks at Cam with an odd mixture of relief and loathing. "No," he says coldly, "that isn't Aly."

"...hello. Would this be more comfortable if I went and swapped for one of those then, I am not here to upset anyone. Or, like, instances of me could be out of the picture altogether except insofar as you might want us to look over Kib! I could go get one of you, or something."

His expression changes as swiftly as if it's magic. He can damn well play along with this a little longer, even now that Thauron's thrown plausibility aside. "Not upset, sorry, just terribly confused. Unless worlds have a recent point of divergence it doesn't make sense that they'd have alternate universe versions of people who look identical. You are quite welcome here.

The most obvious avenue to help Kib is something to make it unnecessary that he sleep, can that be achieved?"

"Don't have anything off the shelf for it if you need it sustained, could probably hack something together, waiting on some experimental results that will tell us if he can do it my way or not... Uh, versions of you and your folks are four for five now from things that can be classified as 'Ardas' but there's one set elsewise. Bells - that's us - we're more widely varied. Why would it help if he doesn't sleep, I'm not seeing it, I mean, sleep is boring and I seldom bother but the connection is unclear."

"A feature of Kib's reincarnation - thing - is that if his memories are erased or tampered with he gets them back in dreams. Rolling him back to before Angband fixes him. We asked the Valar for help and they did it, once, and he was normal, he was fine, he was making a list of specific memories he wanted back so he could have everything relevant without going catatonic, he wanted to hear all about how we'd defeated the Enemy, he was so happy - and then that night he dreamed Angband back, and when he woke up he was convinced this was a hallucination of the Enemy and that he was still trapped there.

So the best we're hoping for is to find a way he doesn't need to sleep, roll him back, and let him have a life again. At least while we try to come up with something that he would have known before Angband the Enemy could not imitate."

Cam... runs through the corresponding logic. Draws some inferences.

"Okay," he says, "that explains the blip in the gap in his written output - and we can probably figure out a not-sleeping thing even if we have to put five of your dad in a room to do it, but it wouldn't be my go-to if I'm guessing right about the details."

"He's doing it deliberately, thinks he'd be easier to manipulate if he were thinking at all and it's even worse if the Enemy can read minds. He can't be logicked out of it because he is not having any thoughts."

"That was my guess. I will want to run this by the other Bells first but we might be able to sort of spook him out of it without mental tampering of any kind. He'll be cranky about it though, if you prefer a cheerful rolled back version this is not that."

"I don't have preferences about his temperament. We considered some ways to scare him, they weren't things the Enemy couldn't imitate -"

"The Enemy's ability to imitate things is not at issue with the - okay, so, we're all Bells, with information about the uniquenesses of his particular Belling situation we will be able to just sort of think like he does. And tell him all about it. And then it will be clear that whether he is thinking or not does not affect the Enemy's access to thoughts-like-his, I think a one of us could probably not self-destruct deep enough to fail to recognize our own patterns of thinking if they were presented to him, and then his options are 'Enemy, if applicable, can produce Kib-thoughts and I'm bored out of my skull and my husband, if applicable, is really upset' or 'Enemy, if applicable, can produce Kib-thoughts and I'm not bored out of my skull and my husband, if applicable, is not really upset'. Make sense?"

"...do it. Please."

"I will need more background information. Reincarnation's weird, servantmaking's a one-off world trait, don't know if his husband is an alt of anybody we know but he's not an alt of anyone interesting enough that I checked for, etcetera, and I do want to run it by the girls in case any of them have a better idea or a contraindication or something I haven't thought of. In the meanwhile will it help with the thing where I look like Kib if I take the coat off, I have wings and a tail."

So, I was also captured by the Enemy and also don't believe you're real, the Enemy just can't learn nearly as much from me organizing people as he can from Kib servantmaking so I'm under oaths to make sure if this is real he can't use me against people and if it's not he can't learn anything more interesting than how to be lovely at dinner parties with people who you secretly believe are all hallucinations. The thing where you look like Kib might be a problem for Aydanci but the problem for me was that increasingly plausibility-straining coincidences that involve the arrival of new characters are one of the hallmarks of a hallucination reaching its grand finale. No preference on the wings and tail.

Even if Aydanci's not up to it - and he probably will be, if it might help - I can give you detailed profiles of him and everything else about the situation, but some of it's politically sensitive so I'd want more context than 'alternate universe version of Kib' - you said you have a me, if I can talk with him briefly about you that'd do it -

Yeah, I kind of figured you had been, that happens, this is the first time it's been one of us but third for you. I can get a you. Available in 'remembers Angband', 'doesn't', and 'human and not from an Arda', if that might matter. None of them really know me in particular all that well except insofar as you guys are, like, scary at knowing people, but the first one and Loki are really close, and the last one and Iobel.

That Cam's Maitimo and Cam are not close is mildly surprising even assuming Cam's straight. His face does not convey mild surprise.

Kib and I were really close.

Any of those would be fine, if they know you.

I'll see if Mitros wants to come then, he's nearest by.

He pops two steps to Hex. Mitros in the middle of anything?

"How's the new Arda?"

"My alt went to Angband and doesn't cope with it nearly as functionally as yous do! I think we can snap him out of it with enough background information. Your alt wants to talk to a you. Oh, and they killed the Enemy all by themselves, place is pretty safe although they did temporarily brandish sharp objects at me for impersonating Kib."

"Huh. Good for them. I'm not a convincing impersonation of my Elf alts, they're too pretty. Head on over?"

"Yeah. Iobel, you wanna come?"

"...yeah. I already dropped the snake guy off in his hometown, not picking him up for another few hours."

"Is their Enemy solution portable?"

"Unspecified. I did mention it'd be handy if it were. They might not know."

Pop through Little Valinor to where he was standing a minute ago. "These're Mitros and Iobel."

"Hello."

"Nice to meet you. Cam said that you just need to know all the specific situational factors in order to jog Kib back into having thoughts, and then we've reduced our problem to the familiar one that no one ever really believes they've escaped Angband." And to Mitros, Findekano and Kib and I were happily involved for several decades before I was captured, is this going to cause problems with either of yours from any angle -

No. Congratulations.

Thank you, he says, and almost smiles.

Okay. Why don't you all come inside and sit down and I'll give you everything you might need about the situation.

In they come. Cam fills Iobel in on the premises of his conclusion; she derives the same.

Okay. From the start, then. Kib got eaten by a giant snake. This caused him to land in Valinor about sixty-five local years ago. He was eighteen. On his world people do not have children; babies appear in hollows in the ground and so forth; he grew up in a crèche, which is how that world raises its children. In that world people have the power to create shines - he points at one - and shades out of patches of light and darkness, and to animate machines of various types. You have to program and build them, and anyone can do those, but only people of that world, as far as we know, can awaken them. They can also make animals into pets that obey their commands. We had a dinosaur cavalry and Findekano rescued me from Angband on a pterosaur but when Kib was captured we had to kill them. Kib was apprenticing in servantmaking.

Kib arrives in Valinor. He finds Elves bewildering, asks if there's anyone helpful around, is directed to me. I get him set up with a place to live in Tirion, learn about the babies, am appropriately appalled, ask what Elves can do. That's how we hatched the scheme you must have seen -

Yeah, we found this world because a fellow snake victim turned up at their palace having heard of their otherworldly magical powers saying he was from this other world, could they let him go back for a visit, and I went to scope it out first and I saw a sign directing me to Little Valinor. And then the Elf there mistook me for Kib. - You're bouncing the osanwë, right? We could also just all talk in another language and osanwë you a translation.

You're a couple years older, he was still eighteen or nineteen when my father cured mortality, but the resemblance is striking. Anyhow, after learning about the babies we learned that humans were mortal, and Kib helped my father with some preliminary experiments to try to figure out how to cure it, and then we set to work on production of things we could sell on Kib's world to fund the storks. And Kib developed a book-copying golem. And we played a lot of Governor, in the evenings, he's brilliant.

Kib had been for several years having recurring dreams that didn't fade on waking, about a girl named Aly who'd been born twenty-four years before him, lived in a different city, and was psychologically very similar to him. It was not until we realized that he actually spoke a language Aly'd spoken that we realized the dreams had to be meaningful.

There was a festival. At the festival Kib said very loudly that he was gay and Arda's very conservative and it was a disaster and I ended up snapping at him and then we miserably avoided each other for a week until my boyfriend decided to ask Kib out.

...okay, that's a new one. This is your Findekáno? Assuming the Ardas all have the same naming scheme?

Yep. At the time he was metaphorically the only sane man; now he literally is, and none of us could have gotten through this without him. Anyhow, I'd spent the last month longingly telling him things about Kib over games of Governor, and then moping at him, and he asked him to a concert and they adored each other.

I thought eighteen was too young, you know. By the local years it was even younger than that, there's only 310 days in a year on Kib's world. I was taking a stand on principle. But it was a stupid principle and did not last very long, not with Kib existing around me, not when he dreamed that Aly'd been the inventor of storks - I told him that made him objectively the best person in the world' - and anyhow the three of us were deliriously happy for a while and then Kib dreamed Aly'd been married.

Married to Aydanci, who is brilliant and worshipped the ground she walked on and who, after she died, eradicated the disease that killed her. Kib wanted him back. Kib went and found him. He was in bad shape, he'd done nothing but grieve her for eighteen years. They were delightedly reunited and Kib said, um, he hadn't remembered he was married, he was so sorry, and Aydanci said it'd be terrible for someone else to go through losing what he lost just for the crime of having excellent taste, and so. That's us.

That's really cute. No sign of Aydanci alts...?

He isn't anybody I checked for. I haven't checked the other way around yet.

You'd already have heard about him if any of me had met him. He's lovely. Anyway, we were all blissfully happy in Valinor for a Year after that, expanding the stork funding program, waiting on my father to end death, trying to avert Arda's annoying prophecies - Kib told Findekano that he loved him, and he hadn't told me, and he explained he was waiting for romantic occasions which I was far too paranoid to engineer, and so I terraformed him an island and made him a stunning little boat and we went out and watched the sun set together - anyhow, eventually we noticed that someone had been smuggling babies into Valinor. We told the Valar. The war started shortly thereafter - it's really a shame I can't get you Kib's notes, he gave me permission to read them if it helped with my recovery and I think that'd reasonably extend to alternate universe versions of him and the cause of his own recovery -

...and you can't get them because?

Sank into the sea when Beleriand did. The Enemy had the continent set to crumble when he died.

Fucking deadman's switches. Anyway. I've got them. I can conjure arbitrary material objects and specifications like "written works of my alt here" are a way I can do that, that's how I check for alts. I'm not going to read his notebooks very closely unless it turns out we seriously need them though.

After I was captured and before he was he did a private half-page and a half-page for me, so I could have something to go off, piecing things back together. That'd be the first place to start if you needed to reference them at all.

Anyway. We went off to war. The warservants do most of the fighting, but it's hard to program them to be sufficiently flexible, we had Elves to command them. I got captured. I got rescued. It was - really hard on him, what a wreck I was - and then I assembled myself into more functional form and we had the weaponry to stop Thauron and while the army was out at war he got captured. Since then he's been unresponsive except for the time in Lorien.

By "unresponsive" you mean...

He doesn't have thoughts. He will snuggle us, he will say 'love you' and 'okay' and 'you can do whatever you want' if we try getting his consent for some new attempt to help him, he will refuse to be around anything intellectually engaging and disassociate if anyone tries to be intellectually engaging at him.

Well, that sounds really unpleasant.

It's not even the literal best strategy, it would just be something he could re-derive fast on negligible information...

Out of curiosity, what do you think the best strategy is?

Lacking non-negligible information, couldn't tell you - it was never a priority for me to come up with a plan for this - Loki'd probably have a better idea. I take it back, it might actually be best on the condition that you can pull it off and that you do have to be able to re-derive it like that. Which he did.

And one is lucky enough that the Enemy can't lastingly remove or tamper with their memories. There are other considerations, but it certainly - serves, sort of. Can you fix it?

As far as it goes, I think so. I'm not sure where to go from there but it should get him thinking.

I'm tempted to suggest introducing Elspeth at that point but it seems as likely to hurt as help.

Wouldn't risk it.

I've been considering whether to get my memories tampered with until I stop believing this to be a hallucination, perhaps we can debate the merits of doing that together.

Loki's one of you doesn't think it's a hallucination any more but I'm not sure how well the method replicates. You might respond better to Elspeth than one of us would, actually, I'm not sure, I'd want to ask him. Elspeth is our alt Bella's daughter and she has a magical power to tell the truth convincingly. She'll be swinging by to turn your Valar into remotely reasonable people soon anyway.

If I believed this were real and the war were over and I weren't necessary I'd kill myself. Is the one you're referring to not done with his war?

No, he is. Uh. No Elspeth then, I suppose.

He raises an eyebrow. Kib wouldn't rather I keep thinking I was in Angband. No matter what I wanted once I was free.

Well then when he's walking around having opinions again he can go invite Elspeth over for dinner, I don't own her, but I'm not going to fetch her for you if the likeliest result is suicide, okay?

At least talk to Maedhros first.

Do you need anything else to get to work on Kib.

We'll want to talk to his husband a little bit, otherwise not so much.

So he walks with them over to Aydanci and Kib's quarters. Findekáno's there too.

"Hello. Have we been explained."

"Yep. Pleased to meet you. Kib hasn't shown any inclination to attack people but the golem will restrain him if he does - do golems recognize alts as such -"

"No," Maitimo says. And he sits down on the bed next to Kib. "Hey, Kib. I'm really sorry about this."

...Kib opens his eyes.

Kib is confused.

"...this is the part where he's trying really hard not to wonder what you're sorry about, because anticipating it won't make it less unpleasant especially in a condition where he can't brace for it effectively. He recognizes me and doesn't have a cached response to that, nor to what I'm wearing, which must look pretty outlandish; but my voice'll sound wrong because it's not coming from inside his head, which he may not have known if he doesn't come from a culture of sound recordings being common so it'll seem like an obvious mistake, maybe just obvious enough that he almost thinks about it to see if he can derive with negligible effort what it might be supposed to mean -"

Kib is not happy.

He stares at Cam like he's an alt of the objectively best person in the world.

"He doesn't know how long we can keep this up, and going back under sucks so he's going to put off coming up as long as possible, but this hasn't happened before, he is having trouble reducing what we're saying to meaningless noise - probably the fact that it'll sound like his native language helps. Doesn't have a way to be sure that this isn't a dictionary attack, because the dreams're unpredictable... Do you have an idea how much dreaming there is left to do?"

"He's filling in the last - bits and pieces from Aly's life," murmurs Aydanci. "The Enemy couldn't take them and Lórien couldn't restore them. He may be done in a year or a few years."

"So not so much that we could reasonably be hoping to hide key deletions from him if we let him sleep; it'd be a gamble, and as long as he has the rest of this incarnation without any missing time he knows there's nothing else to hide them in, and if Aly dreams are indelible places to hide things while he has access to unbroken memories of this incarnation are running very thin."

Kib puts his hands over his ears.

He watches Kib.

"Wow, voluntary actions to affect his stimuli!" says Cam loudly. "That only took about two minutes! I assume he's been operating under the assumption that if the Enemy has him all options to affect what happens to him are manipulative, illusory, intended to derive information about him, or all of the above, whereas if the Enemy doesn't have him he can trust you to present him with food and protect him from miscellaneous hazards and avoid giving him sensitive information and all he has to do is not get in your way, he's been going metaphorically limp. And yet you are letting us talk even though he's visibly unhappy about us and wants us to go away and let him get back to implementing his minor strategic triumph! I told you he'd be cranky."

"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?"

"Kib and my father went on a scouting mission to the human world. My father saw a baby being dropped off and decided he wanted her. It was lucky, later, because we were desperately short on servantmakers. Also she's a lovely young woman."

"And Kib thinks it was nice Aydanci had a friend his age who grew up the same rate."

"Stop that!"

"Make me."

"I like you," Maitimo says to Cam. "If you're Thauron he's really outdoing himself."

Cam snorts. "You can get Loki to show you a fun little cinematic illusion of her killing her Thauron with her bare hands! She got mine too but it wasn't as neat-looking."

"If anyone's curious the way Kib makes us stop doing 'that' is by having non-Bell-generic thoughts, which is a bit harder."

"Killing ours was very satisfying too, though no bare hands were involved because we had servantmaking. I can't imagine how satisfying it would have been if I'd believed it was real."

"Loki's on the lookout for a way for Maedhros to kill a Sauron one day. Since he didn't get to even fully appreciate her doing it the first time. Though he did throw her a lovely party."

"I feel so sorry for both Maedhros and you," he says complacently to Mitros. "You are missing out, not being in love with one."

FIndekáno giggles.

"...I did marry her," Mitros says. "And if there's ever a spell for it I'll take it in a heartbeat, why not? But yes, you seem to have had it all before you got tortured into insanity and so did Kib."

"I think it's probably technically inaccurate to say he got tortured into insanity," Iobel says. "One of the dubious advantages of the not thinking strategy. I mean, I'm sure it didn't do him any good but I imagine he spent most of it insufficiently present to... appreciate it? And we're good at self-therapy, not that he'll have taken the time to do much of that. He'll probably have fewer hangups than you do if he ever concedes the point on this being reality, although he won't be as good at hiding whatever he's got."

"Ugh."

"Yeah, I'd noticed that. It took an earthquake to get a reaction from him like stepping too close would get from Maitimo."

"Earthquakes? Why earthquakes?"

"Fucking figure it out why don't you."

"Oh, come on, you know we're going to take that as a challenge."

"Oh, now he's testing us," says Iobel. "Charming. So if my theory's right and why shouldn't it be the earthquake would have had to happen while he was thinking and forming associations normally and, ideally, in a context he can't now recontextualize as being fake; unlikely to be some mundane natural disaster, that would be an irrational fear; but earthquakes are totally the kind of thing Ainur do, aren't they -"

"I bet you're very pleased with yourself."

"No you don't," Cam says, "you're saying that because if we're taking cues from you about how to act you want to throw us off, and it's easier to hide shit like that with sarcasm than to try more elaborate subterfuge."

"When the army made it back to Mithrim there were fourteen thousand dead and fissures in the earth, nice and neat, as if he'd had weeks in advance to decide exactly where the crust would crack open. You'd think by then we'd have stopped underestimating him."

"Saurons are good at escalatory nastiness. Or maybe it's the Melkors, I'm not actually clear on how much steering they do, Sauron seems to have all the personality. All the creepy, evil personality."

He nods curtly.

"Kib, anything to keep an eye out for besides earthquakes?"

"Oh, fuck you."

"Wow, you can really tell that he hasn't picked up a notebook in years, that wasn't even quippy."

"Alright, I think you have bullied our Kib back into the world of reasoning beings, did you mention having a way to make the Valar reasonable?"

"Elspeth does it, but apparently we're not introducing you yet, so she'll just pop in by Taniquetil and then leave, I guess. Kib probably doesn't require round the clock supervision but he is out of practice and when he's in a better mood he'll be able to sort of use us as prosthetics, so we'll probably want to be around a lot for a while - or Bella, or Loki. And we'll tell Maedhros where to find you."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Sigh.

"Bye."

And the visiting Bells disappear and drop a note to Maedhros that he may wish to swing by.

"You need anything?"

"...Me?"

"Yup. You once tried asking me if I was okay, revised to 'worse than baseline in a way I can do anything about', sound familiar?"

"My memory is not the problem here."

"Do you want them to come back and do your thinking for you? I think I know you pretty well but I don't think I can quite pull it off myself. You're trying to think of another strategy, right? Got anything? I suppose if it takes this long to come up with it's already useless..."

"Sorry, when did this go from being 'do you need anything' to 'how about I make fun of you', I feel like I missed that transition."

"Your alts seemed to think this might help, and you haven't suggested anything else. I can do compliments if you like. It was a brilliant strategy, your alts couldn't think of a better one given the constraints."

"It's a hell of a set of constraints. They told you mockery would help?"

"No, they were making fun of you themselves. Not entirely fairly, either. It is one hell of a set of constraints, isn't it?"

"If I understand correctly they think it helps if they do it.

Yeah."

"Cam can create arbitrary objects. You can have your notebooks back if you want them."

"What, and you let him leave without getting them?"

"I was sort of expecting it to take a little longer.

That wasn't mockery," he adds hastily.

"Taking it as a premise that this was real, what would you have wanted us to do?"

Sigh. "I meant it when I said you could do what you wanted with me, I was a writeoff for my purposes, you could shuffle me around however suited you. Hopefully you weren't expecting me to be all chipper like in Lórien, because then you'd be tragically mistaken about how to evaluate what suited you."

(Aydanci is quietly crying on his shoulder. Kib pats him.)

"It suits me to hallucinate that you're thinking. Which you are. So I definitely did what suits me."

"We just wanted you back."

Sigh. "I will probably forgive you all eventually. And... all of me... eventually. That's weird as fuck, what else did I miss about - that."

"My human alt married your human alt and would meet most conventional definitions of 'in love with her' but is struggling to contextualize that because he's still as gay as I am. Also I'm pretty sure he and Cam have hooked up, which is interesting only because Cam's not close with his Maitimo and is I gather the only Bell so far not to be. Which makes me curious about the circumstances - maybe that Maitimo doesn't have a Findekáno to fix his inevitable moments of really screwing things up? The humans are a bit outclassed, Loki's the most powerful instance of you and I think the corresponding me, the one called Maedhros, the most powerful instance of us? Cam's indestructible and can make arbitrary matter so I'm intensely curious what the fuck makes Loki the most powerful instance. Cam and Loki are an item. Humans don't servantmake anywhere but your home world, we can definitely start galactic exporting if we want everyone on the lost world to be outrageously rich."

"I think Iobel and Cam have hooked up too," remarks Kib. "If you don't think the Enemy reads minds because the format of incarnate thoughts is too weird for him how do you explain there being clues in your environment of appropriate richness for you to pick up on things like that when presumably you don't consistently list them?"

"Really big corpus of interactions to copy and paste from? He must be really confused by the sort of things I sometimes identify as tells. I am also worried he can do things like 'have an interaction occur that leaves Maitimo with the following impressions'; that'd mean I can never ever be sure, and it's likelier than surface mindreading, it's consistent with how the brain actually stores sensory impressions and memories..."

"...wait, can you identify specific tells or can't you?"

"Can. I thought about trying to share at one point but you were doing entirely different strategies, all my tells require thought, so it wouldn't have helped."

"If you can, then he can't be doing the thing where he's directly leaving you with an impression."

"He can't be always doing that, there must be some required level of scaffolding."

...sigh. "We expecting your other alt with the weird consonant cluster in his name to show up in time for dinner?"

"...that conversation should be private, I can already imagine pretty much exactly how it's going to go and you guys shouldn't be present."

"Hell, I just regained the capacity for curiosity fifteen minutes ago and you go and do that."

"Remember when I said something about Angband and you said that if I didn't clarify your imagination was going to do the work and I said you weren't imaginative enough, was I right?"

"Not by a wide margin."

"My alt is going to say that I will never again experience a moment in which I prefer existing to not existing, but that there are a lot of worlds out there and a lot of people and what the fuck do I think it means, to be a King, if I choose not to do something about that? And what does it mean, every trust I've ever won, every person I have ever told I loved, if I hurt them merely because my existence is unendurable and always will be, has he run across a cowardly alt. He will tell me that there is no point in hoping and it hurts a little less once I stop. I don't get to die. That's what he's going to say to me."

"Well, if you can predict him that well why is he going to visit at all."

"I have no idea."

"I think," Kib says wryly, "Aydanci wants me to himself for a bit and is too overwrought with all the everything to say so."

Findekáno takes his hand. They leave.

And Aydanci - uncharitably, babbles, but it's all very Aydanci, and someday it will probably be useless to keep Kib alive anymore and some fifteen year old will roll over in bed back in the lost world and it won't do for the kid to pick up bad habits like mistreating one's spouse just because they had a bad dream, so Kib accepts apologies and issues apologies and lets himself enjoy the first actual kiss he's had in years.

And Findekáno refuses to leave - points out they can have the conversation without him anyway - and is still there when Maedhros shows up.

"Hi," Maedhros says to both of them. "So, first, I was persuaded by being handed free will, but you'll only be able to verify that you have that if there's some future-binding positive oath you know you swore before you were taken prisoner, is there?"

"Nope."

"Okay. You can also get married, Enemy can't fake that, you could be stubborn and conclude he also has Findekáno but at that point the war's lost and I'd expect him to stop playing excruciatingly subtle games and just torture you both for all eternity, and also I still don't think he'd do it, it means he can't force you to father any children for him -"

"How long were you there?" Maitimo says.

"Fifty years."

"I don't know how your world works but I can't marry Findekáno -"

"Can too, it's expectation-controlled! It didn't make much sense that the universe regarded marriage as metaphysically for straight people. Uh, since we're going to give you free will afterwards what you ought to do is select a person who is exceptionally unlikely to be in Enemy hands, maybe someone who stayed in Valinor, marry them, then get free will, but I'm guessing that'd be difficult -"

"Could you do it?"

"Yes. I could. I'd be faking, and I'd feel weird about the other person's capacity to consent considering how much I'd be faking, but I could."

"I'm not positive the Enemy couldn't fake the person, if not the marriage."

"So then marry the obvious candidate, get free will, conclude you're not hallucinating. I might come up with something else that'll do it but I haven't yet."

"I'll grant you that this is at least the most setup Thauron's given one of his pickup lines."

Maedhros nods. "Then, once you believe this isn't a hallucination, you can learn to teleport and it helps, a ton, with the feeling that as long as it could possibly happen again there is no such thing as a life worth living. We also might be able to become the kind of thing Cam is, and that means as far as we know we can't be killed but we also are indestructible and nothing can ever seriously hurt us again. I have been weighing it.  And there's a way to die but it depends on Loki and it'll hurt her if you ask so please don't, as a personal favor? It's a big multiverse, you can find a different one."

"Can I."

"You already know why you won't, you don't need -"

Maitimo sighs. "When we've fixed the multiverse?"

"Yeah, of course. We -" he looks at Findekáno - "I love him, I love my family, I love my people, but I am not sticking around for them, not once we've fixed the multiverse. If we still want to die then we can."

"If?" Maitimo says. "You're not sure?"

"I - suspect I won't want to. Things are tolerable a lot more often. There was something recently that made them much worse, I'm still in a mood about it, but the trajectory is good. Doesn't mean it'll be the same for you, of course."

He nods.

"I wanted to compare people, see who all we've got alts of -"

"Of course."

And they set to that, eyes alight like two people who do, however reluctantly, dig a great deal of joy out of living.

The next morning Kib asks the King whether it still actually serves a security purpose that he doesn't have root on the golems.

"Nope. Aydanci's welcome to add you back, and I'll tell Lári to on the ones Aydanci doesn't have. Would you like an apology?"

"I think I told you once that I only get annoyed about not being allowed to have things when I actually want the things. Wasn't an issue."

"I didn't mean for the golem permissions."

"Oh. What for?"

"Hmmm, the most objectively awful thing was extent of willingness to tamper with you in Lorien until I had you back, but you were pretty upset yesterday, too."

Shrug. "Aydanci beat you to it. It - seems like it fits wrong, apologizing for either."

"When I don't regret them and would do them again? Or do you mean since in neither case did I think I was doing them to you, and in neither case do you think I was actually acting?"

"I do not see a need to filter all my overt responses to everything through how pessimistic I'm currently feeling about how hallucinatory things may be any more than I feel a need to graffiti the margins of fiction I'm reading, so that doesn't enter into it. And I think you're adopting a consistent policy of acting in ways you'd endorse if this were real at least given your uncertainty... Not quite the first thing either, more - I would not have wanted the applicable motives to be weaker."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"My alt suggested a way I could know it was real."

"Well. Thank you for not running out and seizing it and turning up dead without leaving a note."

"I - we were of one mind on that. Got to fix the multiverse first."

"It sounds very big."

"Neither of us were exactly happy about this fact."

"I don't actually get more suicidal than wishing I'd wake up fifteen again having reassured myself it was all a dream. I don't know how bad it'd get for me if that weren't a realistic possibility for me."

"I am having a hard time modelling what knowing it's real would do for me. And the teleport, he says he has a teleport, so I don't ever need to fear it happening again. He's still in somewhat bad shape but he was there fifty years, he's probably got more to work through. Might turn out that if I knew that and had that I'd - basically be happy, most of the time. Dunno.

We could have killed you. Should we have?"

"You mean before or after you no longer needed Aydanci on a vengeance-fueled workaholic binge?"

"Sorry about that, too."

"What do you think he did when it was the pox, that's just what he does, it's not your fault."

"I sure used it, though. I was worried he might work himself to death."

"If he had actually died you probably should've killed me."

"Would have, yeah. I'm not sure he can function without you, and if he were going to be in the lost world - and we couldn't use you in the war anyway -

It's really good to have you back."

"But not good enough that you want to live or anything, let's not get crazy here?"

"I did hurt you, telling you how the conversation'd go. I knew it. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."

"Yes you should have."

"On a moment-to-moment basis existing is very unpleasant for me. I can reconstruct what things not being like that were like, and rejoice to have you back, somewhere inside me, but it's all at a remove. Don't - don't expect you can be so miraculous to crack through the remove, I don't even know if it's possible."

"Expect, no."

"Do we want to get Cam's attention and ask about those notebooks? And then I can tell you my alt's plan to prove this is reality, and you can help me poke holes in it..."

"Sure. Did you find out why Cam's lukewarm on his you?"

"The conversation with Maedhros was kind of - very focused. I didn't think to ask. I would be inclined to say it's the same reason Aydanci and I aren't more than friendly - we met in wartime, we're both workaholics, there were more important priorities - but Maedhros met Loki during his war, and they're still very good friends." He pulls out a sheet of paper, writes 'hey Cam, Kib would like his notebooks and come to think of it the Noldor'd probably be overjoyed to have our library the Enemy burned down, stop by when you get a chance? You have my profound gratitude, Maitimo'.

"This is a weird form of communication."

"You didn't catch the idea? Arbitrary material objects. It's so exploitable. Maedhros is thinking about doing it, if it turns out that works, but he thinks we'd be an angel, which get a far inferior powerset."

"Why, what do they get?"

"They can change things into other things. Useful, admittedly, but you can't do anything like 'conjure up the complete written works of the Enemy' - Cam can apparently even resurrect some species..."

"What species?"

"Ones that run their minds on calculator chips in their heads! I got confused at that point and Maedhros said that they had a primer and everything and once we were in the right place for it emotionally we could catch up to how the galaxy does things, maybe go join them on their planet."

"...calculator chips."

He waves his hands helplessly. "Maedhros thought I would need a primer, there's plausibly a two-sentence explanation that'd make it click perfectly for you. Anyway, there are Elves who have calculator chips in their heads and Cam can resurrect them. He can also just make arbitrarily many copies of them, and rolled everyone in Angband back to before their stay, and apparently that worked and they didn't still think they were hallucinating even though given just that information, they obviously should have..."

"Rolling me back only that far might have worked for me till I remembered the wrong thing."

"You think you guessed it faster because Lorien put you back farther?"

"No, I think I remembered the wrong thing."

"My alt thinks I should convince myself this is real by getting married."

"Would that... work? On any level?"

"Marriage involves a soul bond thing that's done by Eru - or by whatever forces govern the universe, if we're Eru skeptics, apparently he's yet to make an appearance on any Arda...and I genuinely doubt that the Enemy could fake it. Could, obviously, force some other prisoner to marry me, overwrite them with whatever he knows of whoever I think I'm marrying.

As for whether I could do it, if I wanted to there are always mind-altering oaths."

"Soul bond doesn't include any identity information?"

"It should but I'm much more certain that he can't fake a soul bond than that he can't somehow fake the identity. Though mostly because I have no detailed idea of how it works and can't usefully ask people now."

"I never did get around to asking anybody what being married is like for Elves."

"My alt also has a way of giving Elves free will, so oaths dissolve, as do marriages. The Enemy can't fake that either, or he'd be able to swear falsely. So the idea is I marry, and if this does not satisfy me that I'm not hallucinating I get the marriage dissolved, which really ought to."

"Seems like kind of an awkward question to put to some girl."

"My alt further insists that the only reason marriage on Arda is between a man and a woman is because it's governed by expectations and that's how everyone thinks it should work. Doing something you expect to result in marriage is what creates a marriage. Which, obviously, don't go spreading around."

"Well, then you could just marry Findekáno, but if you marry Findekáno are you even going to want it dissolved?"

"Of course not. Unless that's the only way to be sure it's not a hallucination, and even then, I'd want it back, once the power to dissolve it has been established - Elves can see in each others' eyes when someone's married, it'd be very disruptive..."

"I suppose you could claim that via extradimensional miracle of some sort one of you was a girl at the time."

He laughs weakly. "And all of Tirion shall cry out in unison, but which one!"

"It was dark and you lost track," suggests Kib.

He laughs. He looks at Kib like Kib is the best person in the world.

And then he frowns again.

"I got myself together on that front after we lost you. Partially because it felt unfair to Findekáno to not have anyone left, partially because I wasn't scared anymore it was a hallucination, I wanted to know it was. And now here I am, scared again - because if I take this hook and it's all just the absurdly convoluted end to this convoluted scenario, and I let myself believe I could get married, and then he's Thauron..."

"I don't suppose you can do something obvious like phrase whatever thing you say to - oathify the marriage - with a name instead of 'this here person'. Or - if it's expectation controlled - expect it not to work in cases of mistaken identity; if it's not expectation controlled it'll only work heterosexually anyway?"

"Can't hurt, but my guess is that it's 'if you expect this to result in marriage it will', it'd be odd if you could derive new information about the state of the world from expecting carefully enough."

"I'm not sure that principle holds if the expectation itself causes things, but it's tenuous, yeah."

"Might try it anyway. In a month or so, so I can enjoy having you around and lucid first."

"Anything in particular you want to do with my lucidity?"

" - I am in fact still pretty bad at sex, there is a list of triggers and it's very long - I am not even sure if it counts as a bright side that you can top if you want -"

"...that was not actually a come-on unless this is, in fact, what you want to do with my lucidity."

"Governor's out for the obvious reasons. I didn't actually have anything in mind. Just - watching you react, watching you talk, watching you think - I do want to kiss you, if you'd like that."

"I'd like that."

It's half a lie on both ends, but it doesn't feel like one. He holds Kib in his arms and Kib is thinking and the Enemy's dead and neither party melts into a monster.

And kisses are such wonderful things. I love you.

I love you.

Kib plops his head on Maitimo's shoulder.

"I kinda want to go back to the island. With the fluffy grass."

"I'd like that too. We can ask Cam to take us, when he shows up with your notebooks and my library."

"I wonder how the terraforming held up, it's been so long."

"If it's all ruined I'll have to make you a new one! Or a continent! Or a whole planet!"

...Kib giggles. "I love you."

"I will build you a universe full of beautiful places. We will visit them in between saving worlds. Just - just stay awake for it."

"I'm awake," murmurs Kib.

Then they can kiss until interrupted by interdimensional visitors!

Cam turns up and is directed their way and knocks ever so politely.

"Come in!"

In he comes. "Hey there. Where do you want the library? And do you prefer the notes in hard copy or do you want to begin an exciting journey into the world of advanced information technology?"

"...Hard copy's fine for now."

He tells him where to put the library. "Thank you! Also, I terraformed Kib an island back on the lost world, could we possibly visit it?"

"Sure, osanwë me the look of the place and let me know when you want to be picked up."

He sends Cam an image, and Kib How long are you going to want to visit?

Few hours, maybe.

And here they are.

It's overgrown in places, but not everywhere. It's still very pretty. "Couple of hours, please? Thank you."

"I'll land over there," Cam says, pointing, presumably in case they'd otherwise be in flagrante delicto someplace he was going to appear. "Have fun." And off he goes to place the library and the notes.

"I'm glad it's still here." He flops on the ground. "Oh, and still soft."

Flop! "This is the best grass."

"It's a challenge, designing things for the objective best person."

"I'm sure at least one of my alts has me outclassed."

"Same person, doesn't count, and if it does we'll still figure out how to do more than them.

Cam's pretty cute, though."

Snort. "Thanks?"

He rolls over in the fluffy grass to kiss him.  "Thank you for coming back."

Kiss. "I assume they told you in excruciating detail why they expected it."

"Yep. They also said you'd be cranky."

"I'm sure versions of me who have not spent years being excruciatingly bored because the alternative was mindreading make some kind of cute principled distinction between reading and extrapolating," he mutters.

"Seem pretty different to me."

Sigh. "Yeah. Just didn't feel like it right then."

"I'm sure it was terrifying.

Do you really think the Enemy could have pulled that off? He never had you thinking for more than a few days, you think he had a good enough model to convincingly be several alternate universe versions of you?"

"I haven't actually fallen asleep since they showed up," Kib points out.

"Should I leave you to it? Nice fluffy spot for napping and determining that you're free and safe?"

"I'm not tired. I've been sleeping a lot."

"I think it will take me a very long time to get tired of having you back."

"You know," he says, "in retrospect that was a really impressive speech you pulled out in Lórien on such a time limit."

"Had to try.

I mean, actually, it occurred to me briefly that perhaps I shouldn't try, in case you had been captured and I did have the ability to talk you out of your strategy and he could use whatever I said."

"We find ourselves in this weirdly symmetrical situation. I know you're out because you got rescued before I got captured, but it's always possible he got you again somehow - you know I'm out because I was out when you got captured but it's always possible he actually got me after that, which he did, and that my rescue is just part of your hallucination -"

"The question you asked me when I was first 'rescued', about whether I could be sure I was alone in a hallucination -"

"And you couldn't. It... concerns me."

"It was probably wrong to try to snap you out of it. I don't think it was wrong to let your alts try, they were - just demonstrating a capability they had anyway, if they're not real..."

Sigh. Nuzzle. "Yeah. I guess it's better to know they can do it."

"If the Enemy has access to your thoughts anyway you might as well not be miserably bored. You can turn it back on again next time the torture starts - how does that work, by the way, I'd be delighted to not form instinctive associations under the circumstances, not to mention being less entertaining, but I don't even know how I'd go about turning it off..."

"It's - the input does not constitute information. It's just happening. It's noise, I don't have to participate in it, I can abdicate the idea that there's any steering to do... It, it hurts but it can't teach me anything. - It's not perfect. I'd still fall apart if you actually started hurting me, way out of proportion. But I'm not going to flinch if you move because I haven't absorbed anything horrible about what that's supposed to mean. Just noise."

"Oh, Kib.

I wish I could promise I'm not going to hurt you but I - if he's really got you - I had an opening to kill other prisoners, a few times, I took it -"

"If I wake up fifteen again and remember you doing that I'll forgive you," murmurs Kib.

"Thanks. Well, aren't we a merry couple."

"Ever so."

"Can you - talk? About whatever you'd like, just - be okay at me, it's very soothing -"

"It was nice when you sang to me. You and Findekáno. I was almost not bored, when somebody was singing."

"Should've guessed that and made sure there was always someone singing."

"Aydanci sang sometimes too. He's not an Elf but he was brought up thereby, he can do it all right. Round-the-clock wouldn't have improved things much, I might've gotten sick of it to the extent I could get sick of things that weren't actively unpleasant."

"What could we have done -"

"You did really well under the circumstances! I was simply not going to be having a lovely time with my brain not involved."

"Well. Now you've got it back and can have a lovely time forever, if this is real."

"That'd be nice."

Kisses. Aydanci had kept cutting Kib's hair for him. He runs his hands through it and sighs.

D'you want to take over cutting my hair again?

If you'd like.

It was cute. I guess I don't know if it'd still be cute.

My interest in intimacy is at this point powered entirely by a desire for the Enemy not to have succeeded. Might take a little while to find something you actually want in that mess, and I will not have hurt feelings if you decide you want the sane boyfriends.

You know, I think if I look really hard and apply myself to the problem I can probably locate a desire for the Enemy not to have succeeded.

He laughs.

I love you.

I love you too. So what are we making the Enemy not have succeeded at.

Convincing me to be terrified every time anyone but particularly one of you touches me? Getting me to disassociate whenever I think someone might want me, making me hate being touched - it's a long list. He delivers it as lightly as he can. He does not let go of Kib.

And Kib doesn't pull back, just listens and ponders and - Are you sure naive reexposure is how you want to handle this?

I also did lots of internally poking at things and untraining them. Lorien offered to roll me back. I'm not sure what else there is - I bet somewhere in the multiverse there's mind-altering magic, I don't want that -

The internally poking and untraining thing would be what I'd do if for some reason it were really important that I be calm during an earthquake or - something.

Some bits were hard to justify as a priority but I got around to a lot of it. Had to, or I couldn't have eaten, couldn't have handled people walking into the room, couldn't have handled it whenever I saw my face in other peoples' heads....

- not sure I understand the last one.

The scars upset me a lot. I know it's not very reasonable.

Ah.

I got over it. And then Lorien fixed it.

Nod. Occasionally when I'd forgotten the right things and was thinking anything I'd hope they'd miscalibrate on how fragile humans were or something...

Hugs. I bet they did, a couple times, with their servantmakers. When I was new and very naïve I thought I could maybe provoke them into it...

Sigh. No such luck. And anyway you'd have popped out of Mandos all - Mandosed - and I might be a girl next time but what would poor Findekáno do -

Written the saddest songs in the galaxy, probably! If you came back as a girl and I was already Mandosed I could see him asking to get fixed too, actually. If you wanted us. He shudders.

Well fortunately this hasn't come up. ...Sounds like I'm usually girls, sample of - five and a half. Odd that they all look alike and don't look like Aly. They don't look that different, but - different.