He explores that one for a couple of minutes, and then yawns. He's getting very tired, and the buzzing-overwhelm feeling is hovering around the edges of his mind, kept at bay by the calm-effect but encroaching. The marginal value of more information here is dropping. Asking her to leave is a decision, though, and he gets stuck on it and just looks at her. 

"I'll come back next time you ask for me," she says, taking off the synaesthesia and getting up.

"Can you do the sleep thing." It's not that reasonable a time for sleeping, but he's too tired to do anything and being too tired to do anything and also awake is unpleasant. 

"Yeah, of course." Sleep. And out she goes to collect Van and Yfandes and see if Melody is ready to go yet.

She is! She's also bubbling over with general enthusiasm. "We covered a couple of other things, it seems like we'd picked up different styles - Nayoki's Sight is so different from mine, we can See all the same things and do all the same things but the, hmm, the emphasis is different? And so we've gone in different directions, but I'm really interested by hers." 

:I am guessing he will be tired after speaking with you and we ought to ask about changing the Gift-blocks a different time?: Nayoki asks Bella privately. 

"That sounds really interesting!" Yeah, he's napping.

Melody seems maybe a little confused about Vanyel's presence, but doesn't ask. They can all go back to Haven. (Additional staff can be roused up for mana if necessary.) 

It's necessary. She taps them and brings all three passengers along.

:That was surprisingly stressful: Vanyel tells her privately. :I couldn't tell if he even wanted me there: 

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Shrug. :He asked for me, so I'm glad I went, I don't know what else I could've done: 

And Vanyel will go on with the rest of his day, trying not to be distracted about Leareth. 

Angband Leareth sleeps. Wakes. Sifts through the conversations he remembers, vaguely wishing he could have taken notes that he trusted. 

He remembers the message from Maitimo. It still takes a massive effort of will to pick it up, and again to unfold it. He reads it. 

...What would he be feeling, in the world where this was real? 

Relieved; at least he knows someone is being the right amount of paranoid. Grateful. Touched. Wishing he could see Maitimo again. 

An emotion is a very long way from an action. It would give Melkor information, of course, but - mostly information he already has, and information he could use to torture Leareth more, not coax him into acting. 

He lets himself feel the emotions, just for a little while. Cries, hiding under his blankets. 

Nayoki comes in that evening and asks about the Mindhealing block. 

Leareth is suspicious on principle, but sure, that seems less irritating than occasionally being unable to walk to his washbasin because he thought about magic. 

Then she can do it. It takes about ten minutes, and only that long because she's being very careful. 

Velgarth Mindhealing has a very recognizable feel, and this isn't a technique Leareth has experienced before; he can feel his Gifts slowly slipping out of his awareness. It's almost like Bella's agnosias, they're there, he's just...forgotten how to use that part of his mind. It's a lot more thorough, though, by the time she's done. 

(It's also terrifying, and he lies still and shakes and fights to keep his breathing even, but even with most of him panicking, there's still a corner that can notice things.)

At that point he's exhausted again, and skips supper because he isn't hungry and sitting up to eat is too hard. He's more than ready to sleep by the time Bella asks him. 

He doesn't ask for her the next day, local Leareth conveys.

Or the day after that. He's thinking, and it's easier to do uninterrupted, well, spread out during the stretches of time where he can make his brain do anything. 

For the hypotheticals-game where reasoning works, he has a list in his head of points in favour of still-in-Angband and points against; local Vanyel's startling emotional stability is a point in favour of still-Angband, he thinks, albeit a confusing one; but there are too many items on both lists, it feels formless, he can't just count them because some are stronger than others. Usually he would get a sense of the gestalt, but that requires trusting his intuitions, parts of his own mind that he can't fully see, and he doesn't. Even in the world where he's rescued, his mind is still compromised. 

Are there any individual observations that are conclusive, one way or another? 

Melkor shouldn't be able to imitate Mindhealing. But he could, conceivably, have somehow forced someone - Vanyel? - to Gate back to Velgarth, and grabbed a Mindhealer. It seems well outside the domain of plausibility but it's possible. 

Bella's subtle arts power is not Mindhealing. It's too precise and doesn't have the noticeable side effects. She can read his thoughts directly through his shields. She can reach in and close the part of him that recognizes faces, while touching nothing else. That's not a sense-hallucination. He could have drawn the lines of her face perfectly, it just didn't look like her, or like anything interesting at all really. That's a lot deeper in than memories and senses and even thoughts. 

...If Melkor could do that, why in all hells would he have bothered with the kind of repeated memory erasures and tries at convincing him? He had eventually noticed; that's why he destroyed his own core sense of self and motives, so Melkor couldn't use it against him. But if Melkor could fiddle with minds on the level of detail that Bella can, he could have just selectively shut down some of Leareth's cognitive faculties, and then shut down his ability to notice... And he wouldn't have let Leareth shred himself, Leareth is far less useful to him like this even if he's a lot of fun to torture, and Melkor isn't stupid. 

If Melkor could do all that, he wouldn't have needed a centuries-long plot to foment the civil war, by impersonating people and spreading rumours, he could have gone in and changed people's goals. 

The entire arc of Arda for the last thousand years makes no sense, in the world where Melkor can do this. And he could posit that Melkor found a world like Bella's world recently, gained that magic, but - one, if he had the power to travel between worlds then he should have won the war instantly, and two, that's already cancelling out much of the complexity-penalty on the alternate explanation. Which is that absurd shenanigans resulted in a human from two worlds away, with a friendly Companion at her side, making a mistake in her spell and landing in just the right place to pull him out, back to an earlier version of his own world complete with local version of him. 

Gah. 

...

Leareth's head hurts. He bounces off thinking about it for a couple of days, just reads boring books and sleeps and stares at the wall, noticing that he's not being tortured and that's nice. 

...

It's pretty conclusive, though, that positing Melkor having Bella's powers explains too much, it predicts additional wins that he knows aren't true. 

At this point, he thinks, a sane person would just conclude that they weren't in Angband anymore. 

Leareth isn't, currently, very sane, and knows it, but - in the end, he has to figure out what he believes on his own. It's been a game so far, to make it safe at all, but there are real stakes. 

He can't. He spends the next hour or two pointlessly panicking over the fact that he could have had a belief about what reality was and notsafenotsafenotsafe–

...

Some formless number of days later, Leareth forces himself to look at it again. Why does it matter, that he end up with an accurate belief here? 

Because there's a world, out there, and - and if he's out, then there's probably still a war going on, and people might die - Vanyel might die, Maitimo might die - and that still matters, even if he's broken...

He teeters on the edge of it for a long time. 

I think I am not in Angband anymore. 

Local Vanyel taps Bella's shields to check if she's interruptible. :Um, local Leareth poked me again with the communication spell, he wants to talk to you: 

Thanks.

Leareth?

:Bella! I - am not sure that he wishes to speak with you, but he is suddenly very upset and wants something and I think it would be easier to figure out what if you could come and calm him down: 

...there in five.

She reschedules things and pops up north.

Angband Leareth is sobbing and shaking and hugging himself, scrunched up against a corner of his room rather than in bed. 

Local Leareth is hovering by his door, visibly baffled and worried.