Telumë thinks that we shouldn't let Maitimo talk about insect biology research with some student from Tirion? 

It feels really implausible to me that anything bad would happen but I think I've been persistently underestimating Maitimo's  - scope. Telumë thinks something would go wrong?

:I think Telumë does not see any specific way that something could go wrong, but also he is not underestimating Maitimo's scope. Or Sauron's. But - he obviously doesn't want Maitimo to be miserable either. Almost certainly he ways this could go wrong are not literally going to cause us to lose the war. However, the precautions we'd have to take to ensure Maitimo doesn't have any avenues of sabotage here would include keeping the Quendi involved in Velgarth and without communications back home until the war is over. I can imagine people might still volunteer for it, but it's something they'd have to know: 

I bet some people would still volunteer for that. He - really shouldn't be alone. And he shouldn't only interact with people who are trying to get something from him.

:I agree. He hasn't been alone - they've got some of Telumë's staff who can be spared volunteering for it, and not interacting with anyone else. Honestly the main risk here is that Telumë basically has to both talk to Maitimo and also make plans, although there are a lot of precautions in place to make sure Maitimo can't do much with the information even if he makes inferences about our plans from talking to Telumë: 

Why does Telumë have to talk to Maitimo?

:He knows the right questions to ask him so he can't be evasive. They tried having someone else on his staff talk to Maitimo instead and it was - much less useful, apparently, Maitimo is very good at being uncooperative even under a Truth Spell, which is not surprising to me at all. I think they're getting close to the point of just having all the relevant information, though:

(Not that he is sure Telumë is going to stop talking to Maitimo, at that point, even if it's obviously strategically correct.) 

Huh. Well, that makes it more urgent to get some other people in who can take over from him, then, once we don't need to ask more questions. - maybe not the specific people Maitimo requested, but we can put out a call for volunteers?

:That makes sense. Anything else we should discuss before I contact Telumë again?: 

I don't think so.

Then Vanyel can move on to that. 

Jisa watches Maitimo's mind from the other side of a wall, her range helpfully extended by Fëanáro's artifact.

Maitimo's mind was a pretty nice garden, at one point. It's a weird sort of garden - it's clearly a lot of different plants, most of them aren't - native - the best metaphor her Sight can offer her is that they're grafts, presumably from other gardens, very skillful healthy grafts but visibly not his, not to start with. 

(She can see a bit of Leareth in there. More than a bit, actually.) 

If she hadn't seen it before, it would be hard to figure out what it used to look like, because - right across the entire thing, cutting through all of it, is something like a trellis. It's non-native in a different way; her Sight wants to tell her it's metal, some sort of weird exotic metal too, not a material that anyone's garden uses. It's pretty elaborate, with lots of pieces, it reminds her of how even the practical building components in Quendi designs are also art pieces in their own right.

Every single plant in the garden, at least everything bigger than a blade of grass or tiny weed, is at some point knotted through it.

It's clearly been there for a long time. Plants that are not meant to be adjacent to each other, but were pulled that way by the disruption, have grown together. The oath shapes everything. 

...It reminds her obscurely of a lifebond; it's not the same kind of thing, lifebonds are native to the mind in question and this isn't, but it has the same kind of depth. Actually, no, it reminds her even more strongly of a Companion's mind. The sense of something present that was built there, not grown, but is even more unbreakable for not being natural. Her Gift can't budge it at all. And - Companion's parts are breakable, in the right circumstances, but only when two pieces of that unbreakable alien substance come into conflict, the strain between a rock and a hard place. This oath is too careful and skillful for that to work, and - she doubts it would work anyway, at least not without tearing Maitimo's mind to shreds in the process. 

She can't fix it. It hurts to admit that to herself, but, in fact, she can't. 

She can...make it less dangerous, maybe? The oath isn't removable but some of those plants could be carefully untangled from it, and then she could squeeze in a block. But all the routes to doing that basically involve making him less a person. If he were sufficiently a threat to their operations right now she'd consider it a lot more thoroughly... She's not sure how much of a threat he is, actually. 

Maitimo wakes up in a beautiful room with his hair loose and his head kind of fuzzy and lies still for a little while trying to think through the situation. 

There is not all that much he can usefully do without thinking about it at all, and no thoughts that won't be used against him. And he should probably assume it has been a while and there's nothing useful to be done at all, at this point. It feels like it has been a while, though he can't remember any of it. 

- huh. One of the things that has stuck in his head where no memories have is that he misjudged someone, quite significantly. It manifests as a general sort of unease hovering over all his thinking about the situation. Misjudged who - Leareth? It feels at once unlikely and terrifying. Sauron? Maybe. 

His hair is starting to get tangled. He looks for a hairbrush.

There is a hairbrush on the bedside table, and a note in Quenya saying that if he goes out through the curtains there will be a place to bathe and also food. 

- "Leareth is keeping him as a pet now" doesn't feel quite right for the source of the mysterious feeling that he misjudged something but maybe it's a component of it. 

Is the handwriting familiar?

It's not. 

Does this person have any talent at calligraphy? (He bathes. He brushes his hair. After a moment of consideration he braids it badly, badly enough he'll notice next time -)

Not especially. It doesn't look like Quendi handwriting, it looks like the writing of a human who spends quite a lot of time writing and does it well and cares about neatness and legibility but not artistic merit so much. 

He knows all the humans who speak Quenya but they could've copied it from somewhere, probably. 

He tries to explore his surroundings.

This doesn't work. Even simple things like figuring out how many rooms there are don't work. Trying to go walk through the whole thing with his hand on the right wall doesn't work. Trying to count how many paces until he runs into a wall doesn't produce remotely consistent results. 

He sits back down on his bed, shaken, trying not to show it very much. He feels like he could cope with the sudden kidnapping, with the realization that they're modifying his memories, with the loose hair and everything that implies, if only he had a good guess what he badly misjudged -

Being alone is kind of eating his brain but also it's going to take some work to give Leareth meaningfully varied interactions from this baseline and more time is probably more chance to diverge, there.

Telumë comes in maybe half an hour later. (Again, he asked not to be interrupted until finishing his current block of work.) 

Jisa comes in with him. "Maitimo, you haven't eaten yet. Please eat something. You can do it voluntarily or I can set-command you to do it." 

"That's an interesting definition of 'voluntarily'. I'm not really hungry." He actually feels very dizzy from having tried to explore the room.

She hasn't fixed the horrendous thing that she did to her hair but the roots are growing back in dark, so it's been a couple of weeks or they went well out of their way to make him think so. That fits, that's long enough for Leareth to have extracted everything he needed and moved on to - whatever this is. 

Telumë puts some food on a plate and fills a cup with water, and brings both over to the bed. He sits down, a few feet away, not trying to touch Maitimo. His face is - guarded, still, but there's some warmth there. 

"This isn't exactly an interrogation but we do need to talk," he says, very levelly. 

- scaredscaredscared -

- "for you I guess I can reschedule a couple of meetings." He takes the food.

Telumë folds his hands in his lap. Looks Maitimo in the eye. 

"I plausibly should not be talking to you," he says. "From a strategic perspective, I mean. We are on opposite sides of a war, and you currently wish to destroy everything I think matters - it is stupid for me to give more avenues for you to do that, and you need not even be consciously thinking about it and trying in a way we would notice." He looks down. "But - I would be very sad to make that decision. You - share enough traits with the Maitimo I met - that I still love you. As you are now. I have watched you being very clever in achieving goals I hate, and...still admired it. I want to talk to you. I want to hold you. But I can only justify doing that if we can come to some sort of agreement. I have formed alliances of a sort even with people whose actual goals I was deeply against, when our common interests aligned in the short run. And maybe we can find a way for that to hold here." He looks over at Jisa. "You can tell him about the alternative." 

Jisa twists her hands together. "I can't undo oaths. But I can - separate some of the parts of you from the oath structure. I don't want to because it'll harm you, and I don't like harming people even when they want to torture all sentient life forever. But if you're not safe for Telumë to be around otherwise..." She trails off.