She nods.

Do you have an idea of how long it'll be before you're ready to go back?

I have been thinking about what stage of recovery I want to present myself as being at. If I'm still acting weak and sick then people might not touch me because I'm fragile, and they can write off a lot of my gaps as delirium, but they won't listen to me. If I pretend to be okay it'll be weirder if I slip up.

Mmhmm.

If it was kobolds the first one would be the obvious thing to do, especially with me being a Speaker, but they probably won't interpret it close enough to the same way.

How would kobolds interpret it? And that's how I'm leaning, it's - more latitude.

Someone being sick or needing help isn't a reason not to take them seriously, among kobolds. It's a reason to make sure they have the help they need to be able to do things - which sometimes means having a Speaker or healer around to help them out with making decisions, if they need reminders or whatever - but if someone can do a thing they can do it, it's pretty straightforward.

The problem is telling whether I can do things that are non-obvious, like 'make wise decisions'.

Right, that's why me being a Speaker matters. If you were having problems with delirium I'd be helping with that and I'd be able to vouch for specific decisions as not being affected by it.

I don't think it's that straightforward. Lots of decisions will involve being sufficiently careful about a hundred different considerations and having thought of all of them.

I didn't say working with someone with delirium was easy.

I served my grandfather for two thousand years and I would by the end have been competent to evaluate when he made a decision whether he'd made it advisedly, and only barely, and only because I also knew the considerations rather intimately.

Mmhmm. And if you did have delirium other than maybe the very mildest sort, I wouldn't actually be going along with this, because I don't have that kind of knowledge. But you don't, so all I'd actually be doing would be vouching for the fact that the impairments you do have aren't relevant.

Is this the mild sort?

...not what I meant. You don't have delirium, you have a different problem than that. You can think fine, once you have the information you need, and you can tell what information you need. You need to be careful about taking this seriously enough, but I think I'll notice if you aren't, and at least while the war's on I don't think that'll be a hard problem to fix if it comes up.

I am not very worried I'll fail to take it seriously enough, I'm worried I won't be good at it.

Why?

Missing the things that made me good at it before. Maybe I fail to get them back.

Yeah, that's harder - not really cause not to take you seriously, but.

If I knew more about your culture and things I could probably help enough with that, but I don't.

It's okay, everyone else around me will. I will not have to lean on you for everything.

Mmhmm.

And it might work out.

Yeah.

What happens if it doesn't?

I think at that point they'd understand if I died in a training accident.

Mandos might be able to help me.

She sighs.