You could just kill me.

I'd rather not. I'm not much of a healer but I don't think it's that hopeless.

Not the injuries. I could help those along, it's just not worth the bother because they'll reinflict them. I think they'll stop you if you try but the best thing to do for both of us is to kill ourselves if we can.

Oh. We're - we're not there any more. I think that wasn't even the same world.

I don't understand how your telepathy works, I'm not sure I'm doing it right or what besides very simple things I can do with it.

Oh, this is a fake escape. Okay. Please don't bother me. I'll heal myself if you leave me alone a while.

Wow getting out of there was the right call.

Okay. If you want anything, let me know; I'll have soup ready in a while.

He wants to die, but if the fake escape'll drag on a while longer he may as well play along, insisting on dying will probably ruin their fun.

He slowly starts prodding his body to heal.

And she goes and makes soup, trancing every now and then to keep an eye on him.

After a few hours he is too tired to stay awake and has patched the places where he doesn't have enough skin to stand a chance against infection and he falls asleep again.

The soup doesn't take that long. She brings him a bowl when it's ready, but he's obviously busy and she ends up eating it herself. She arranges the rest to stay warm, and then with nothing else to do she huddles miserably by the fire until he falls asleep, at which point she gets herself a blanket and goes to sleep as well.

When he wakes up everything is unfamiliar, and he's stressed, and then he remembers it's another rescue hallucination. He sets to work on healing some more burns and gashes and broken bones.

She wakes up a while after he does - for just a moment, the presence of someone else lets her think that the past six months were just a bad dream, but then she remembers, and groans. She only lies there for another moment, though, before getting up to stoke the fire and check on him.

Hungry?

No thank you.

All right. Let me know.

What do you eat? If you can get by on mostly meat we'll probably be fine, but if you need plants or anything I'll need to go gather it before the season turns.

I won't eat meat. They've already done the feeding-him-other-prisoners but he doesn't have to voluntarily participate.

She spends a few seconds thinking about the state of her food stocks and how much someone his size probably needs to eat - the results, based on her speculations, aren't good at all, but she's also badly overestimating how much food he needs.

Okay. It's not going to be a very comfortable winter - this is an understatement, she expects him to be near-starved and herself to be badly malnourished by spring - but I'll try to keep us alive at least. Is there anything else you can't or won't eat?

There are lots of things I cannot eat. You needn't feed me out of your stores. Is it supposed to be currently winter?

It's nearly winter, first snowfall will probably be this month or early next; not a good time to be setting out on your own in a strange place even if you weren't injured and it was safer here. And I consider myself responsible for you; I brought you here - I can't do as good of a job of that as I'd like, but I'm not going to just give up with someone else's wellbeing on the line.

No, I mean, I don't think I'll die if I don't eat all winter. Your thoughts suggest you would. And I don't mind dying, and again you would.

What.

I would. It seems implausible that you wouldn't but I guess you'd know better than I would.

I'd mind dying less than you'd think - I was expecting that spell to kill me, not put me where you were - except you'd be in trouble if that happened and that's not okay.

Why were you trying to kill yourself? And why would I change that?

She shudders just slightly and hugs her knees to her chest.

Kobolds aren't meant to be separated from our tribes. I can hold on if someone needs me to, but by myself... not really.

How did you get separated from your tribe? And how did you end up in Angband?

Sigh, huddle. When I got my teleportation magic, they misunderstood and thought I'd been hexed - had hostile magic done to me so I was dangerous to them. We exile people for that, it's the only safe thing to do, but it's still pretty awful to be on this side of.

Angband is where you were? The spell I did... I thought it was going to just teleport me away and not put me anywhere, but it put me there instead. I used a couple spells I already had to bring us back; I'm not sure I could cast there, there's something weird about it.

You can teleport?