"Sure. So the thing I just did was -" This. Psychic spaghetti, sliced through, carefully labeled and she's just attached this one to that one and she's pretty sure they were originally the same noodle but if they weren't it will have done something really strange, that's why she wants his help - and before that she hooked up these two severed ends -

He... understands what's happening, actually, once she shows him a mental image.

Not because the spaghetti makes more sense to him in itself, just because - the thing where he can't feel like anyone is really there just because they're not in his head¹ is fixed² and so is the thing where he doesn't find anything compelling or valuable, and now someone is talking to him. In his head, in fact, if only a little. He would desperately like that to continue, more than he actually cares about the answers to any specific questions. He can come up with questions he barely cares about for a while.

"What do those marks mean?"

¹that's not quite why

²slightly improved but he can't remember what it being fixed would feel like

"Those are little flags I placed so I can keep track of everything, they're sort of like sticky notes with numbers on them, not really contentful - I placed those while you were holding the door and I was looking at an example person to compare the structure against."

"What are they? Can everyone see them?"

"No, I can only see them with subtle arts, I think your plane has some kind of non-subtle-artist telepath maybe but even on my plane most people aren't subtle artists. They'll go away when I'm done, on their own if I don't take them down but they're easy to take down. They don't do anything but be visible."

This is objectively boring but also the most desperately welcome conversation he's had in over a decade.

"The other telepaths you mean are probably the dragons. They - you know."

"I don't actually know. My plane has dragons but they're really really different, I think they're... not even sort of the same thing apart from being scaly winged quadrupeds."

"What are your plane's dragons like?"

"Best avoided. Capable of shapeshifting. Really into having a lot of stuff. Very powerful, usually solitary, not particularly telepathic but very very magical."

"Dragons don't shapeshift. On Pern, I mean."

"I got that sense, yeah. Pern's the name of the plane?"

"No, Pern is the planet. By a 'plane' do you mean all the - the normal places, the ones that connect to each other without needing to go between?"

(Between is... not that. Maybe it's not anything. It's where you are, when you've slipped out of all the ordinary places that have things in them and distances from each other, before you come back to reality.)

"...well, my plane has just the one planet, outside our sphere it's just a lot of gibbering horror sorts of things, but I... think that sounds about right?"

"The horror things don't gibber. They just eat everything alive or dead."

"I've never met one and wouldn't be here to talk about it if I had, the gibbering might be metaphorical."

"Who fights them?"

"Epic adventurers, I guess."

"What?"

At some point maybe she'll notice the thing where he's compulsively keeping this tangential conversation going for no reason, but he really can't stop and hasn't enjoyed anything this much in a very long time.

"People who've gotten into so many fights and so much intrigue and done so much inventing and discovering and picked up so many magical artifacts that they can do impossible things that nobody else could get away with. - which isn't really relevant to your treatment plan."

"That's true." She can't just stop talking, she can't just abandon him like this, he can't bear to never again have anyone talk to him for the rest of his life, surely there's something he can offer her that would make her want to keep talking to him. "What... is the treatment plan, anyway, beyond not giving up yet. What are you hoping to achieve here?"

"I'm going to keep connecting up the spaghetti, as long as it doesn't seem to be making you worse - you seem more talkative? Do you know if you are... innately... talkative?"

"I don't remember what I'm like as a person. I wouldn't be the same now anyway, I'm older. I just - haven't had - I've had conversations but I wasn't there for them. I might be talkative, too. I really don't know. I usually like it when people talk to me but - not as much as I like it right now? Am I too talkative? I don't want to be offputting. If there's something that would make me a pleasanter conversation partner, I'll try to do that."

"You're fine, but we'll be here for ages if we don't get on with it and I'm not sure how long I can get away with staying in this interplanar bar."

"What's in the way of you getting away with it?"

"Oh, just, it seems like a pretty abuseable thing, doesn't it, an interplanar bar that pauses time. Risky to lean too hard on anything about it. But I really do want to help you. How about I join up another couple of flags now?"