<It's not super noticeable without anything to compare but compared to Paloma it's pretty obvious. We can probably rig up some kind of alternative to eating while we work on that, or instead of working on that, but it seems plausible that if you weren't hungry you'd feel a lot better about everything all the time, apparently humans don't work very well when hungry.>

<I know.> Every way they changed him was to make him worse. (He doesn't know yet why it's worse to be a man and if Ashkon isn't complaining about it he desperately doesn't want to go back, but he's aware, in the back of his mind, that there is something horribly wrong with it.) They didn't want him to sleep because it made it hard to think, hard to question them; probably they didn't want him to eat for the same reason.

But he doesn't yearn for food. He vaguely feels like maybe he ought to consider doing something about it on principle, because making him into someone who cannot ever even want to eat was somehow wrong, but... it does very much feel like they did make him into someone who can't even want to eat. And - he's not, actually, in a position to make important choices, so it doesn't matter very much if his judgment is worse because he's fasting. If Ashkon would find him more useful if he ate, then -

Well, he doesn't really want being kind and considerate to be a notably worse strategy than being demanding and cruel. So he basically only wants to enforce boundaries about things that are so important that he can't see how Ashkon's attitude would matter. He said he didn't want to be made into an immobile pain sphere because that's bad enough that if letting him have boundaries is going to have any value at all it has to rule that out. Being made to eat would be very, very bad, but... well, no, not really. It would be the worst thing Ashkon has ever done to him. It would be worse than anything that happened while he lived in America. And he's gotten a bit soft, thinking of that as very, very bad.

<You can do whatever you want but I like the idea of some kind of alternative.>

<I don't think there is anything wrong with being a man, Paloma isn't and that part didn't seem importantly different. We can try drinking different stuff and I can do some research about ways to not be hungry without eating.>

Imaginary nodding. Drinking different stuff sounds kind of appealing, maybe. Or whatever Ashkon wants to try, it feels somewhat easier to try to be accommodating than to try to have preferences of his own.

<Yeah. I'll get recommendations and we'll try things.> Paloma has recovered her normal Yeerk; he fistbumps her/them and starts heading home.

Whoa, fistbumps are weird.

<I like them. Less sweaty than handshakes.>

<3

Back into the routine of music school. Ashkon's pretty good at the dulcimer.

Every day he tries a new beverage. Not caffeinated; he's tapering them off caffeine with pills and doing beverage search separately. He goes for thin smoothies, milkshakes, juice, milk and its imitators.

Smoothies are sort of tolerable in the moment. He can tell himself it's important to Ashkon, and that probably if it were really horrible he could stop, and that he'll be more useful afterward. It's just that afterward he keeps dwelling on how tolerating things on the idea that he'd be more useful afterward wasn't really worth it last time.

Milkshakes pretty quickly reduce him to incoherent internal screaming. Juice doesn't, though it makes him want to gag. He had forgotten what milk tastes like, or maybe it tastes different here and now, or maybe both; he can distantly imagine what it might be like to like it.

He likes almond milk. That's putting it generously, maybe. He uncomplicatedly wants more of it, even if that's largely because he's starting to be able to tell that he's starving.

Ashkon drinks lots of almond milk and puts various useful nutrients in it in powder form.

He'll try add-ons once each but hates most of them unless they're outright imperceptible, and having discovered something he likes he's somewhat less willing to tolerate things he doesn't. But if they try enough flavors they'll discover that he likes protein powder if it's peppermint flavored, and he can be only mildly grudgingly frogboiled into drinking real milk too.

He gets restless. He wants to maybe learn to climb things, or practice tumbling. He wants to run. He's not going to insist, though.

It occurs to him that he's being kind of stupidly all-or-nothing in his estimates of the power of Tide and Vanda Nossëo. They can be entirely able to control his every action if they want and still limited enough that making them do so costs them resources that would matter elsewhere. Ristrell mentioned a treaty; he should take that more seriously. Maybe they could be played off against each other somehow. There is no reason he should do that but it's a thing someone could try to do, and it means there'd be some point in thinking independently about - not really about right and wrong, exactly, but about what he might want the world to be like, and whether there's anything he can actually learn from the evidence presented to him by people who can read his mind and see the future.

He's still emotionally living in a world where everything Ashkon says is perfectly trustworthy because it would be more annoying to be forced to believe things. But he stops modeling Ashkon as a master who happens to be very nice and starts thinking of him as a friend who happens to be very powerful.

<I don't think I'm even very powerful, in the grand scheme of things.> Ashkon is swimming; it's popular around here. The Elves can catch fish with their bare hands. Ashkon is good enough at the walking on water song now that he can walk back to shore when he's done in the sea.

<On the scale of my life, which is mostly just being your instrument.> There's gotta be an innuendo around here somewhere but he's not coming up with words for it. Oh, well. He is really into Ashkon singing magic, though it gets harder and harder to convince himself he can use that voice for anything else.

Ashkon's kind of right, though. There's some sense in which it'd be easy for Ashkon to keep him prisoner but their surroundings are set up to make that harder, not easier. There's a more useful sense in which Ashkon has such complete control that he can't even breathe without permission, but their surroundings are still basically set up to very sharply limit the exercise of that power. Ashkon is just some guy.

<Yeah, you're getting it.>

He runs and skips around on the top of the sea, trying to keep his footing and his song steady on the waves as long as possible. He doesn't usually last that long if he's not aiming for a steady well-planned walk back to the sand but it's fun and good practice.

<3

His body was good at that kind of thing once. Maybe he could be again.

Maybe if they drink enough almond milk with peppermint protein powder in it.

That would be a lot of almond milk indeed.

He does sort of notice that he's a little hungry, though. And it's starting to be obvious what a difference it makes to eat something sometimes. That and occasionally sleeping. He makes more progress in math this way. He notices assumptions he's never verified and little notes of confusion that turn into important revelations about Vanda Nossëo and Tide. He's happy. He's whole, in a way he hadn't even noticed himself not being. And he's still not gaining weight and still not building strength or stamina.

He wants to try more things. Maybe someday in the distant future when Ashkon is done with him it would be nice to try more things than what Ashkon happens to be okay with. Or maybe not; it's still not a great idea to eat anything before Ashkon visits the Pool so probably after they part ways he'll never be able to eat again. And that will suck. (It's a when, not an if. At the moment he ends up better and more okay every day they're together but he's starting to be able to see that he will reach a point where he wants time for himself and privacy in his own thoughts. He's just not there yet and won't be for a long time.)

<I could probably try eating solid food, it didn't seem so weird from Paloma's perspective.>

<Only if you want to.>

<She likes chips. Maybe we will too.>

Ashkon acquires a bag of chips next time they're at a bus station.

Crunch.

He hates them in the way he hates everything, which is maybe conceivably also well described as finding them too overwhelming and confusing to have a real opinion on yet. If he still wants to gag in a few more bites he’ll conclude he hates chips and not just that he hates new foods.

Ashkon chews slowly, tries smaller pieces.

<3!

There is something fundamentally horrible about this experience and it would be nice to not have a mouth at all but it's... not completely intolerable? He could eat more chips. That is a thing that could happen and it would not be torture.

Next time he has control of his body he's going to research magic for not needing to eat. (He just skips directly to deciding that. There's no step where he consciously decides to consider whether there are solutions to his problem; there's no step where he consciously decides to think of it as a problem that might be worth solving if that were possible.)

<Everything I found was something like you have already - higher quality, but still fundamentally 'not eating won't kill you' and not 'you feel okay and healthy if you never eat anything ever'. Maybe you'll have better luck.>