It's hours later when Loki and Cam bring Bella, Elspeth, and Jake to Vanda Nossëo and make it known to whom it may concern that they're here, news is available about the newest Arda and its adjacent world-with-a-Bell-in-it, and someone needs to relay Elspeth the spell symbols because Golden can't let mind-affecting powers including osanwë through her shield unless she trusts whoever is using them. And Elspeth wants to know if the non-evil Maitimo who was so upset is okay now.
"Well. I guess if we kill them instantly we risk a deadman's switch and if we don't we risk an escape. And it could take a long time to find him worldleaping. Ugh." And to Loki, "Don't apologize, I am just glad it was discovered quickly. I nearly murdered him and then I suppose it might have been a problem but I successfully refrained! For a decade. Once it's not going to be politically disruptive I still strongly favor causing him to stop existing."
"Which prompts the question of what to do with the dead Elves from that world, because it seems likely to be a systemic cultural or even inherent - thing - rather than a one-off. An evil you is one thing, an evil one of your dad, say... The orcs I just asked the Elentári orcs if they wanted some dubious neighbors and they were happy to give it a try, so I shuffled them all onto the orc planet to Aetherize 'em, but..."
"An evil one of my dad seems likely to be a lot less strategic and responsive to incentives than an evil me, yeah. Murdering all of them seems a bit much.
You also can't, just, put a version of my father on a low-tech planet and trust he'll never find a way to get out anyway... do we have any ideas?"
"These Noldor have a few hundred citizens who have alts on space Arda, all of them exact duplicates rather than the 'same personality, different background' situation Bells have. I have a few dozen who have alts in Marlatia. I haven't checked the evil planet yet because I do not think I'm emotionally equipped for that and I am certainly not equipped to run through mental impressions of everyone we respectively know with. Him."
"Cam and I might as well have been exact duplicates as far as we were concerned in all respects not directly connected to gender - ignorant as we were of our respective supernaturals - up until we were seventeen," Bella says. "At which point the old mansion outside of Forks contained books on summoning for him and a family of vampires for me. It's the same house."
"Yep. But my family of vampires - and everyone else Cam looked up - have no alts in Revelation, Limbo or a daeva world, so they somehow managed not to have been born in Revelation without their presence or absence affecting anything in the life of a middle class American between the years of 1987 and 2004."
"If the Valar hadn't happened to mention it I think the evil version of me could have leveraged the trust the non-evil versions earned a long way - certainly into getting free will and getting his father back - and if he pieced together at that point that we weren't all like him he might have been able to manage it a while longer."
"I might be able to hold him given the knowledge that I knew I had to be doing that - in Edda-adjacent worlds, anyway - but I'm not positive - may depend on how exactly it is they moved and I don't know if even a reasonable-ized Vala would want me to perform the experiment -"
"I take a pretty dim view of mind control. There's a couple witches who manipulate emotions left alive - one of them can't turn it off but she's got a pretty sharp range limit, other one uses it to wrangle newborn vampires because they're pretty out of control and dangerous."
"Fair enough. The same method would work for finding someone who could handle any of the others, though, and except Soul they'd probably all go for nonsubtle destruction, and some of them can work a little sideways - the Aether is not really designed for free-will-related applications."
"They don't have a way automatically, but they also don't stop existing. It was one of the first things I checked. After a lot of communication with Valinor Mandos agreed to make a way for them.....it'd be lovely if Cam could do the body and a soul could grab it and start functioning, but I don't think that'd work. Two-adjacent and you're currently just stranded, though I am not sure my soul wouldn't have my indelible teleport."
"I wanted the answer, it was just appalling even having adjusted my expectations. I - I actually expect I could get away with most of what he did, if I were evil and had decided to set myself to that. But coercing people into oaths, no. There are people who'd probably go massacre a village of civilians on my command - who did, during the war - who would kill me if I tried ordering someone to give me a mind-affecting oath."
Very much so. His actual real first instinct was to teleport him all the way to Revelation and leave him in bits across its cosmos, see if there's a non-Tesseract way to get instances of him to stop existing that way, but then he remembered to be responsible. Still. Good on Elspeth. He sends all of this.
"She mentioned that. Came home right when we expected her - I have a witch on staff whose power is knowing the right time for things, and he apparently has more interworld stretch than Alice's prophecies because he was able to finagle a return date. Or I don't know what Jake would have done."
"Yes you do," says Jake, who hasn't taken his eyes off Elspeth since they arrived.
"Vampires can't see infrared, but we do see ultraviolet and based on what Elspeth picked up the acuity's comparable, maybe less distance but better peripheral. Hearing's a little better, smell's a lot better, processing of all of the above is better. I actually want to try turning spellbinders unless a working memory solution is right around the corner and it doesn't appeal to any of them on its merits. And yes, there's now illusions singing to the blood berry bushes where previously I had to have actual people doing that all the time - Elspeth came home with a bunch of songs, Loki supplied a couple more, it'll be more useful once I've read through all her spells and can do my own illusions of them."
"I'd want to try that only under more controlled circumstances. I am told that basement dwellers can move around some, vampires are very good at moving around, and, well, the desire to bite people is much more instinct than reasoned intellectual process."
"It might! I would prefer to try it on an interested Space fork first, and that only after testing on basement dwellers, but personally I like being a vampire even with the drawbacks. Oh - Elspeth mentioned to the Macalaurë in, what are we calling it, Evil Arda, that we could use a painkiller song. Currently that's a huge bottleneck on turning. Presumably we cannot expect to prevail on Evil Arda for favors like that, but..."
"The waiting list isn't astronomical, but we could relax some of the requirements for even getting on the waiting list if our anaesthesia options weren't 'do without, scream for three days' or 'exactly one witch, or Addy can take a shift but that exact one witch still has to be available in case the wrong person brushes against her'. Whereas vampires are quite competent singers and there are lots of vampires. It is still more like hundreds than like millions, for the week sooner question, though."
"Apart from reasonableizing Valar and mind-shielding, it's possible a couple things from my world, which I have decided to call Aurum, might be useful and nonredundant. Nathan, the timer witch, seems able to time things across worlds at a range that at least equals demon informational conjuration, and while his power is very narrow it can be leveraged quite incredibly if you know how. Alice can't see things outside Aurum, even when she tried leaving it, but she can see people who are not from Aurum, therein, and dangerous experiments that could be located there she'll be able to look ahead at the results. Siobhan's witchcraft is making plans which work; she doesn't actually work for me, but might be convinced on her own recognizance to participate in occasional this-and-that. I have a communicative telepath with unlimited spatial range, who's willing to be stationed outside Aurum if that's ever useful. Eleazar detects witches and can get extremely grainy information on out of universe magic too. Pera's power hasn't been tested out of Aurum yet, but she can shunt people and objects into a sort of background reality - it's complicated, Elspeth can explain it -"
"- and there's my husband's power, which I'm circumspect about it but it's one-mile surface thought reading that doesn't respect a privacy distinction like yours does. And there's one of my bodyguards, a half-vampire whose power is to seem really unimportant; you'll be able to pay attention to me talking about her because you haven't seen her doing that, but if you ever meet her you'll only be able to consider her important enough to think about when she happens not to be using the power and it's on by default. Loki and Cam were fortunate enough to show up on her day off."
"All of those are useful to keep in mind. Most of what we're doing is very boring things like industrial production of Elven goodies to sell the galaxy to pay xenomedical teams to treat diseases on planets that aren't at that tech level yet, and occasional coups which I don't think we could relocate and terraforming places with the Valian ecosystem. Do you know if only humans are witches, do you know if humans on other worlds could be witches, do you know if someone's alt will be a witch given that they are..."
"All the sapients native to Aurum can be witches. Hybrids and wolves have to be born with it, humans are sometimes witches while human but turning can bring out a witchcraft that was not present before. I was a witch as a human, so clearly alts are not guaranteed identical witchcraft, but it might be that if Iobel turned she'd match; I can have Alice check."
"Inconveniently, what she mostly wants is the right to control the vampire population's comings and goings as relate to a particular island, and I've already guaranteed her that. But she's not immune to interesting problems and may even have been off human blood long enough to ever be motivated by charitable impulses."
"It'd solve the sourcing, all right, but drinking human blood - haven't tested with offworld sapients; hybrids don't smell like food and wolves really don't smell like food - has undesirable psychological effects, including making it harder to resist continuing to do it in unethically-sourced circumstances and making it harder for us to live in groups larger than like three or four."
"Do you mind if we just have a demon steal them? Or more generally, is there content you'd prefer we be careful not to have a demon conjure?"
He thoroughly enjoys Elspeth's memory. "You know, I almost want to give him a little bit of credit - when he realized he was going to have to give up Findekano to get the weapons to stop the Enemy, he was sad that it was going to be necessary to do that, he did not even think about whether it was worth it."
"We've all got eidetic memories. We usually don't write down a whole lot unless we happen to be communicating by text over long distances," Golden says. "What I meant was I will have someone write it down for you. I assume you're appropriately conscientious about people's personal notes and such; there are no confidential Imperial documents to worry about."
"It's - I am actually less concerned about him - I will know, pretty much as soon as we interact, exactly what my counterpart was trying to elicit, and if my counterpart turns out to have more in common with Thauron than general attitude towards ethics then I will probably have a breakdown and I get the sense that'd make him nervous."
Aredhel was the one who told Elspeth. She knew it was fucked up. Most people knew that the king's consort was not being kept in consort-standard conditions - Findekáno went around with short hair, hard to miss - but there was some amount of possibly willful ignorance about how much.
"I think to humans and probably vampires it does not feel the same. I'll send a memory if you're actually curious. I - cutting someone's hair without their permission is just a particularly sexual way of mutilating them. And for no reason, I don't even find short hair exceptionally appealing."
"Not backups, no. He doesn't have anything until a soul enters his custody. But he can read all your memories including erased or tampered ones. I would have considered asking his aid after the war if my father didn't have the retroactive eidetic memory necklaces. The majority of the survivors of Angband prefer not to remember it - if that weren't true I wouldn't have told space Arda they'd better not even think about rescue sims..."
Well, he certainly didn't intimate that via Elspeth, who thinks he probably is eliding over a list of hangups a mile long that even alts of his husband are not going to be equipped to navigate. She goes and bounces the content of this interaction to Elentári Maitimo.
"Thank you."
And he pops out. "Delight, can you give us a minute -"
"No."
"Okay," he says, "fair enough." Findekáno?
Yes?
I asked Elspeth to bounce me all her memories of you so I could figure out what's going on, and I think I've got it, and I want to run my understanding by you. So, you have gotten ridiculously good at the skill of 'effecting your goals in the world through Maitimo'. And not much else. And so even though it'd be deeply unhealthy for you to date any of us, it's also probably not particularly helpful for you to hear 'we won't give you any avenue to do things that anyone else couldn't do just as well'. And even though that was the opposite of anybody's intent it probably leaves you feeling powerless. Is that pretty much the picture?
Yes, he says warily. Why do you think it would be unhealthy for us to date?
...um, me particularly because it took my husband and I a decade to get to the point where we could and going through that with someone who didn't love me sounds terrible. Versions of me in general because if you didn't feel like it one night would you say no.
I asked Maitimo to leave me be, sometimes.
Maitimo does not flinch at all. And if they wanted your hair short -
- I'd try to figure out how badly they wanted that and how to get something I wanted.
What sort of things did you usually want?
More compassionate policy, better laws, more personal freedoms -
Maitimo nods slowly. So here, where we mostly agree with you about policy and will not refuse you any personal freedoms -
He wouldn't have leverage to get me to cut my hair. Unless it occurred to him to become eviller for more bargaining power with me, is that what you're worried about?
No. None of us would do that. I just am having trouble envisioning a relationship where you and your boyfriend had the same power and same goals in the first place.
You're right. I'm specialized for my Maitimo and should just go back to him.
If that happens everyone is going to decide that he can't be permitted to live without hurting other people and then we'll kill him.
Well, Findekáno says, in that case I know what I want to use my leverage for.
You want to win over one of us to the cause of keeping your rapist happy? By trading us sexual favors? You do realize that trading us sexual favors will not make us more charitably inclined toward your rapist?
I'm not you, can't find the best angle on people the minute I meet them, but I bet I could figure it out.
The way my Findekáno helps me is by bailing me out when I'm occasionally stupid and loving me unconditionally and not being seduceable into mistakes by his love for me.
I don't think I'm seduceable into mistakes and I will definitely rescue you from being stupid and I would need to have oaths back but -
-that is very much not an acceptable outcome, no.
What is an acceptable outcome.
You stay here and I use you for projects, since that's what you're used to, and introduce you to non-me pretty boys if you're sexually frustrated, and you know that I'll protect you just as fiercely as my evil alt would have, and you avoid distressing anyone by speaking the way he apparently likes you to speak -
-you don't like it?
If it were a voluntary kink thing in the right context - my husband, for my birthday, biting his lip to refrain from bursting into laughter the whole time - I would be fantastically aroused. From you it is disturbing.
So it's not that you're different, it's that -
We are definitely different!
Sorry, he says softly, cowed.
It's completely different! I want you to see the difference!
Look, sometimes Maitimo tied me down and I told him he was a monster and he fucked me anyway. But sometimes he brought me presents and we talked policy until I realized I could get ahead by talking him into bed, and those aren't the same thing, and it wasn't clear to me if you'd enjoy the second kind just because you're all upset by the first kind.
Yes. Someone would very much enjoy playing inappropriate power games with you. But when you played them, you didn't have the option of refusing him, that matters a lot.
To you.
Doesn't matter to you?
Knowing I could leave is the main thing that matters. Now that there are lots of Maitimos I could more meaningfully leave.
Maitimo buries his face in his hands. The Space ones spent several decades apart and were just fine! I am sure there's a 'verse that has one but not the other of us and I bet we're fine there, too!
Yes. But as you observed, the thing I am really good at is you. When Maitimo shows no signs of doing anything other than having his face in his hands, your plan sounds good. But I'd be just as happy with it if you said you might want me in bed sometimes.
Okay. I won't.
He tries not to feel hurt. It wouldn't escape Maitimo.
I do want you to be around my husband and I a fair bit, to see what a functional relationship between us looks like.
Okay.
I am not going to be comfortable in your presence until I've told you I want things and you've said no a few times.
You should want less reasonable things, then.
Come over here.
Findekáno springs gratefully to his feet and walks over.
Oh, for fuck's sake, Maitimo says miserably.
That wasn't unreasonable!
Stand on your head.
He grins. No.
Okay. I think I'm going to call that a day's work and go cry into my husband's shoulder. See you later.
He looks unhappy. Maitimo'll figure out why.
Oh, get competent with computers, get an Allspeak installation, and sit through all of Loki's spells. Please.
Thank you, he says, relieved.
That would have been another good candidate for a 'no' -
- but it was reasonable...
Maitimo pops out.
They knew the Enemy was doing that and that it was really bad but it wasn't really clear what could be done about it without killing hundreds of millions of people and they categorically can't do things that'll kill hundreds of millions of people. If they were the sort of thing that could do that while also being Valar there wouldn't be any people in this dimension.
"It's never been tried on someone who isn't a native of Aurum at all, but my aunt can see the future, so she can check whatever results would be obvious right away - it's long term stuff that she wouldn't be able to catch. Worth noting is that animals usually hate how vampires smell, so we should probably introduce Mama and Cricket or something and see if that extends to familiars."
"Some semblance of procedure for wrongdoing? If I personally arbitrated every criminal case here I'd be better at it than the courts but the country'd still be worse off, because there'd be so much more uncertainty about which factors would be weighed, which tactics they could expect to be precluded against them, which punishments civilized society regards as acceptable...it's not good to have a system that demands tremendous personal trust in the people running it and makes no substantive effort to make them predictable to the people subject to it."
"Right, but now you're giving him ten years to sit around and think about it. Rape is a crime. Torture is a crime. I don't see why you'd complicate it by doing a solution-by-committee. He's not special. All the Iobels and all the mes do not get together to try to figure out how to redeem your rank-and-file rapist or torturer. They have a trial."
"Perhaps we should design one and, when we arrive, drop it and say 'if you sign it and confess all wrongdoings in this area so we can immediately correct them you get amnesty on past mistakes'. I just - can't imagine the mindset of an evil me anyway, but saying 'work on this for ten years while we consider what to do with you' seems likely to get interestingly desperate results."
"Yes, I think that if there is a possible behavior that will make us inclined to let him go or do something else which is tolerable to him, we should tell him what it is, and if there isn't then we should make it the case that he gets less of what he wants if he instead spends this decade giving both sides in the civil war that'll ensue when he's deposed nukes or something, and if there is no way to give him less of what he wants because we're set on killing him and he's purely selfish, then I think there should be another one of him at his side the whole decade."
"I have absolutely no idea, and I don't fancy guessing six times till we figure it out," Iobel says. "But if we do ever observationally form a solid model of however this absurd thing works and I can have one of those I want one, she's great. - Well, I'd probably ask her first. And would probably want to know that her template doesn't come inextricably attached to the story of her life, because there are parts of that I'd sooner skip."
They grudgingly agree it might be a good idea to have procedures in place especially if it's true that literally the whole planet is evil. Can't execute them all. Maybe should just dump Maedhros' memories of forty years in Enemy hands on his evil alt, see if this makes him not quite so murderable.
They don't. It wouldn't be surprising if they eventually did, though. Maedhros' father has just finished working memory necklaces for the Marlatians and this should make them able to develop a spell like that.
...he also might not want to give it to Elspeth, given how she gives things out to everyone. He might ask them for something that does export and import.
The whole planet seems eviler, in sort of a background radiation way, compared to what Elspeth has picked up. It is not inconceivable that this is a small number of disproportionate influences, but some of them are, like, probably the Valar. (She has decided not to try to get a Vala to remove her parents' honeymoon. It would complicate her and Addy keeping each other updated.)
Well, they're making up an interdimensional criminal code anyway, being evil could be illegal all by itself or something, although then they have to rigorously define it instead of tossing it around as a descriptor in lieu of a nickname. As for what to do if the Fëanáro is evil Elspeth does not know.
Do they even have a good evilness-evaluation plan for the live alts-of-relevant people? Like, she met Tyelcormo only briefly, he was not overtly evil at the time if one is slightly charitable about bloodthirstiness towards those who had harmed his (non-evil) friend, how would they go about checking in more detail.
If he happily swore some adequate something... still no?
(Addy isn't going anywhere but that is because Addy can copy magic and might be able to copy something from offworld that wrecked the delicate balance keeping her in line. And she can't swear oaths.)
The thing is that even if he swears his whole mind over to be exactly mine, something could give him free will - and I am not actually sure it'll take additional exertion on his part for his Findekano to come back to him - his Findekano would genuinely feel happier and more secure if I'd take him to bed, he'll happily agree that his Maitimo's evil but he also thinks his Maitimo's the only person to whom he is not interchangeable -
Yeah. I've been giving him work on our projects, and it's all valuable and meaningful work that'll enhance galactic standards of living, but he's not uniquely suited to it and not going to be, and I think for a while I can obviate that by having him save more people here than he could back home - but he'd rather be back home, and he's made it quite clear how I'd change his preference to go home, and -
- I loathe my alt.
It wasn't actually obvious in context back in that world how warped Findekáno was because he was still making use of the maneuver-via-Maitimo skillset, just from a stronger bargaining position...
...he's uniquely or at least shortlistfully suited to being a native expert on Evil Arda without himself being evil? They will probably want that occasionally while they fumble with the problem. It does kind of put him in an awkward position w.r.t. Evil Maitimo but they can probably work around that.
...those are some low expectations all right. Maybe a nice long break and being around healthy relationship models will help. ...were there no healthy relationship models in Evil Arda? She can't actually think of any off the top of her head but she wasn't exactly attending potlucks and meeting random couples who weren't Aredhel And Her Rapist, Findekáno And His Rapist, and Elu And His Whatever The Fuck.
Which would tend to help. (Elspeth's mind flits through Earth culture on the subject - various fading prejudices, religious prohibitions, the fact that vampires can't fuss about it because in a contest between Literally Anything and Some Vampire's Mate the mate will win - probably none of this is useful unless Findekáno wants to watch adorable romcoms or something -)
"I am inclined to characterize his problem more as 'he felt safer in the situation he'd gotten so used to but without anyone holding power over him than he feels in a completely strange situation where everyone's horrified by all his coping skills for the former one'. He'll happily agree that Maitimo's terrible and exasperating and so on right until he gets a sense the rest of us actually want him punished for it, and then he gets defensive."
"Personal affection - some sort of very distant personal affection, but it's there - inability to hold a grievance - mine's like that too, mine's just still perfectly capable of cutting someone off if they're harming him - sense that my evil alt's the only person in the multiverse who actually wants him..."
Elspeth either. They are probably going to mostly quarantine this world until they figure out what's wrong with it. Fëanáro might have to be a special case because leaving him dead forever is mean but he cannot be relied upon to stay put. Is there any way to let people talk directly to him while he is dead?
When Dwi reports this result to Elspeth (it means "who or what is this?"), Elspeth takes over the sending half of things. Hello. I'm Elspeth. I can only send, not receive, so Dwi who just spoke to you is the only way to confirm if I'm getting through. He doesn't speak Quenya but I do and he can reproduce whatever you say to him.
I don't actually know what language he used, he just needed to say something to establish contact. I'm from a neighboring universe; we have different magic there, personalized powers that only some people get, and mine is "telling the truth" but it's expanded from there.
There's a bunch of worlds, and this one is part of a pattern that has recurred several times but it's different from the others; specifically most people seem more antisocial than the other worlds' versions of them. We're thinking of mostly quarantining it, but you'd be hard to quarantine so it's separately important to see if you're antisocial enough to be unsafe.
I haven't met all of them. Maitimo is one of the most obvious hallmarks of this world having an evilness problem, though, his boyfriend's alt took him away to recover and now Maitimo is upset about that. Tyelcormo and Macalaurë I met briefly and neither did anything obviously evil that I know about except for the general not-doing-anything-about-how-Maitimo-treated-his-boyfriend thing that pretty much everyone was complicit in.
"Unsure." And to Dwi, "tell him 'everyone's loosely worried you'll try to develop a way to stop us all from interfering in your business, which they're going to do an annoying amount of; I'm personally of the temperament 'if people try to get in my way I will go somewhere where they can't' but it seems possible you're more the 'kill them' type."
And when this is conveyed, [Running away from everyone who will try to control you sounds like a recipe to be continually on the run and never able to build anything.]
"Yes, but - you managed to avoid picking a fight with your Valar, right? Same thing here. Everyone's going to make veiled threats and everyone's going to make it clear that they'll use their power against you if you do things they disagree with. The rest of us manage because we want the same things as they do, but if that were untrue even slightly I know I'd be continually viciously miserable and it is untrue for you. We are as a kind of person very bad at being in peoples' power, and there are powerful people who are going to want to supervise you and are going to be hard to satisfy that they don't need to."
[I endured Valinor.]
"Yeah. And were you planning on leaving, or overthrowing them?'
[Overthrowing them.]
"So, everyone here's going to be unwilling to take the risk you'll try that when you don't like us."
[You seem very certain I won't like you.]
"You'll like me fine, you're going to loathe all the Bells."
[I can swear that if I have the power to protect myself and make them leave me alone by any means other than harming them, I'll do that.]
"They're also going to worry about what you'll do to other people."
[Happy to generalize it. If I have the power to protect myself and make people in general leave me alone by means other than harming them.]
"That might fix it, I'll ask."
"We have a teleport, does that solve this problem?"
[Not really, people can still destroy everything I care about and as I said it is not very appealing to keep running away from them. I would like a territory in which no one can enter without my leave and the means to evict people from it at will. And a teleport.]
"He's going to confront Maitimo about it and Maitimo's going to say 'oh, don't worry, it's not as if we were lovers', which will calm my father's alt down, and I will only be able to resist the temptation to ask Cam to feed the place into a black hole because, well, firstly because Cam wouldn't do it and secondly because that is also what I was prepared to say -
Sorry. Bet it's safe. If we can have him off-planet and heavily supervised and quarantine the place otherwise -"
"If we don't give anyone on the planet interdimensional travel flat Ardas are not all that close to developing it with our native magic, I asked my father once in curiosity and he thought it'd have taken him a hundred Years - then they're probably better off alive than in Mandos and can't make things much worse for anyone else. I am worried about how my alt intends to maintain his handle on power when the people he assassinated to arrive at it are back, but maybe the Valar will for once be justified in saying the reembodied have to stay in Valinor..."
"I'm genuinely impressed, I don't think I could have been sure off an hour's acquaintance. Well, not an hour's distracted acquaintance. Anyway, if his world even has the same people in it, I'll be curious if I'm right that they're not all evil, and if not that it's off personality somehow."
"It's toned way down, but yes. Might just be because he assumes powerful not-me people are friends with me or persuadable by me. I wondered if it'd happen around Cam, as local powerful person who doesn't like me, but Cam's a little on edge around Finno's whole template, and also too sarcastic. It's not worth putting Findekáno in charge of the 'identifying situations where timely deposit of material goods saves lots of people' errands."
"They'd probably be less inclined to tantrums about it but there's significantly less in common and Marlatia's really not pretty enough and I'm a little worried Findekáno'd combust around six of me. Several of whom don't have boyfriends, not that I'm even remotely worried they'd make a move, but to the extent I've gotten anywhere with him it's been by 'I have my husband, you are useful because I can send you on errands I'd otherwise send my husband on and trust you'll do them as well as he would'."
"Once upon a time, if it were, you know, consensual and not a survival thing -" he shakes his head.
"If I asked him to do anything he considered actually wrong - or, well, actually a wrong to a person other than him - he'd refuse. It's a way of buying himself latitude to steer me away from being evil, and that's upsetting on so many levels..."
"And if I tell him to cut it out he just hears 'no, you do not have any angle to influence me, better hope I'm a saint keeping in mind that you wouldn't know otherwise until I wanted you to'. So he does that, and I'm flustered, and he feels safe, and then I go cry on my husband's shoulder."
"Very possibly. Though he can't lie to me, I can read all Finno's alts like an open book, so even if he were trying to conceal his expectation that I'm going to randomly abuse him I'd still notice it. So maybe more like - he's sure I can eventually be provoked into it, and he'd rather do it on his terms for whatever reason."
"Until very recently he did not have the teleport because we were trying to figure out how to quarantine his home world, which contains his sister and brothers and will once they're reembodied contain his parents. Maybe he's just being compliant until he can sneak them all two hops away, that hadn't occurred to me. It is plausibly what I'd do."
"Well. We're only quarantining the world, not the planet, if he wants to smuggle his family outside your alt's sphere... cylinder... of influence, Cam'll be happy to make them a planetoid or something. But that's still within a hop of Edda, so if he thinks I'll be your accomplice in nefarious deeds..."
There's a little embassy set up on more than half the inhabited planets in the galaxy now. Everyone knows that if you go to the embassy with a problem that affects lots of people, it'll get fixed.
It's not enough. It's the best they can do, there's just so many worlds.
He's been talking to people on both sides of the war and collecting ideas and writing notes for Maedhros. He tenses slightly when he sees Loki.
"There was a civil war between, loosely, people who wanted my father as King and people who wanted his half-brother. My half-uncle's oldest son and I had been. Involved. Before everything went to hell. My father had his assassinated and then he killed both my parents, seized the throne, settled the war.
And kept me. I honestly wouldn't have anticipated it, I didn't know he cared anymore. But they woke me up with the news and had me dragged to his rooms. ...do your people have oaths, or are you like Men that way?"
"I actually don't think there was any point where I wanted to die. Thought I would, maybe, at the beginning - you can't imprison Elves. After a week we start losing our grip on reality and after a month we're dead. Not permanently. A couple weeks had gone by and I was barely lucid and wondering what the point had been, why not just kill me outright - and then he took me outside, somewhere where I was hardly in a state to run away but there weren't any walls, and I pulled my head back together, and he said that if I swore to tell him anything he'd want to know about my activities, and to come back to him at night, I could go where I pleased. So I did. Went to see my little sister and brothers, went to see my parents' graves. Talked to people. Tried to learn about our plans for the war - I was surprised, no one stopped me -
- once we got to Beleriand he drew the oaths more carefully. Everything I swore was time-limited, if I came back and chained myself to his wall it ended. You can use oaths to overwrite people, make them swear to take your goals and wants and passions as their own. He could have talked me into it. He was playing so casually with peoples' lives and if he'd sworn to stop-
- I don't think that's what he wanted anyway -
- we kept it up three hundred fifty years. I was very, very good at it. Admittedly I wouldn't have gotten much done if it hadn't occasionally amused him to let me have things, but I knew how to make sure it amused him to let me have things. Most things I wanted I got. And - I'd cared about him, once, I wanted him to be less of a monster, for his own sake as well as for the people around him. I nudged him into being a good King. He was happy. He likes games and here I was, obediently playing them, exactly how he wanted because it served my ends, too..."
"I felt safe, once I understood him well enough. I felt like I was steering at a couple degrees' remove but I was steering a whole country - and he was obsessed with me, he adored me, I created that because it made me happier - and I understood him. I understood him so intimately. I told him all the time that I hated him, but it wasn't really true - it would have gotten in the way of understanding him, it was terrifying how much sense he made, how sympathetic it all seemed when I slipped deep enough into his head - he was running an endless horrible war against an Enemy who loved psychological warfare, he'd decided he couldn't run it while knowing that, in order to get to the battlefield, he'd burned forever one of the most important bridges in his life - he needed me to stay sane and the world needed him -
- I'm sure it was partially self-serving, but only partially. He's not a good person even very deep down but he knows how to be and knew he wasn't strong enough, and had vague aspirations to, after the war, figure it out..."
"Must have been nice, in a way," he says. "When I had my time as a prisoner it was less complicated. No wars or kingdoms in the balance. Just a woman who wanted me to be someone I wasn't. It would be lovely if I could tell you the secret to finding your own way afterward, but I think I came out of it with a different set of problems - I hadn't ever lived without her before, and I hadn't the first clue how it was supposed to work. Spent a few centuries wandering Asgard, disguised as a girl as often as not, decoding normal social interaction by brute force."
"I"m capable of other things. Just - specialized for Maitimo, specialized for saving the world from him and him from himself, and really, really good at it - he let me go. Someone made it a condition of their help winning the war. I left, and I thought 'do I want to curl up licking my wounds in exile somewhere' and it didn't really appeal - I cam back - I told him I'd probably never touch him again and he said rather brokenly that he just wanted me around. And then I compromised on the never touching him again because it wasn't as if it mattered to me, and it mattered so much to him, and I could achieve everything I'd always told myself I'd achieve with a chance to rein him in - it was the same game, but I wasn't powerless, it was so exhilarating -"
"I figured I'd fix everything I could and then - maybe I'd walk away, maybe it'd turn out that he was one of the things I could fix, maybe I'd find something even better than ruling a country while he brought me extravagant presents and did not get rewarded for them and looked at me like I was the only thing he wanted in the world. Would have been hard to beat, though. Having it work out like that meant I didn't feel like I'd wasted the intervening centuries learning Maitimo. It didn't even feel like they'd damaged me. They'd been practice, and now I was very good, and got everything I wanted play after play after play - It was easily the happiest decade of my life.
And then everyone showed up, and was horrified, and decided that I just hadn't walked away because I lacked better options, and have been shuffling me around trying to find something that counts as a better option, and here I've been, doing that, but the rest of them all pity me and as far as the other Maitimos are concerned I am untouchable because mine broke me and they try but they don't have anything for me to do and I am certainly not valuable to them. I could try to - regress it all away - and figure out what three hundred sixty years ago I would have wanted, but that seems to - miss the point - what I want is for them not to have swept in with their extremely powerful magic at all, what I want is to be back home ruling the empire with its emperor desperately in love with me and me free to play another round with him, if I want, or tell him to go away if I want that -"
"Yes? But maybe I shouldn't, since, you know, everything, and also the Maitimo who told me to come here wants mine executed and probably has a lot of sway, it might be that I need to calm him down before I go back so he doesn't overreact if I do, but I don't know how to calm him down, he notices if I'm doing anything that ought to work and then gets upset..."
"He said up front that if I hit on him he'll be very angry. He'll be upset if I try to explain that I'm not very traumatized or that it wasn't that bad; he gets upset every time he gets a hint of what I'm used to but I can't keep that from him, he's still a Maitimo. He'd be most reassured if I was like 'thank goodness I'm out of that awful situation, I think I'll spend a few centuries wandering the galaxy discovering myself' but he'd know if I were lying - it's not fair, he still prizes loyalty and devotion and service from people in general as much as mine does, he just doesn't seem maneuverable into wanting it from me..."
"If you were one of me I could just say 'go reclaim your emperor, and if anyone questions your choices direct them to me and I'll straighten them out,' but you aren't and I don't know if all the same reasons hold true for you. And I haven't the first clue how to calm down a Maitimo."
"Usually you make it his problem and then make yourself conspicuously vulnerable to him and convey your absolute trust in his ability to solve it. But they're all really upset that they have a rapist alt and they really really don't want me to go back to him - what would be the reasons it'd be the right decision, if it were you -"
"One of the truest things about me is that I can put myself back together after anything. That's part of the reason I couldn't tolerate being the sort of thing that could make unbreakable oaths, particularly not mind-altering ones. A form of harm it's not possible to outlast puts an infinitely tall mountain on the landscape of risk. Loki being able to hand out free will cuts it back down to size, of course. So, the first reason is that even if going back turned out to be the wrong decision, there's no chance I'd be permanently damaged finding that out. The second reason is... I have an unusual approach to risk and harm and wanting things in general. If I say that what I want is to go seduce my rapist and have a comfortable life together, that really is what I want, I'm not fooling myself or letting bad habits get the better of me; I might be mistaken but I'm making a valid choice. If that's not something you're sure of about yourself, then deciding what to do next is more complicated than 'this is what I want, now how do I get it'."
"I don't think I'm fooling myself but I am not as sure about it as you sound about yourself. Being - being the sort of person who'd come back to Maitimo is part of being good at manipulating Maitimo. And it's not as if I've given this a very fair try; I dislike running away from things, and I dislike the company of Maitimos who are horrified at my existence, and I might be perfectly happy mucking around on this planet trying to stop them from having a pointless civil war but I'd be better at it if I could actually bring my primary skillset to bear -
- I might have left him anyway, but it would have been because I felt like doing that -
- being very sure of what you want sounds nice."
"A century of doing chores I'm not particularly well-suited to because everyone feels sorry for me and wants to keep me busy is not made more appealing by the prospect of occasional hookups with people who I shouldn't tell that I'm waiting out the century to see if 'fix, and then subsequently forgive, Maitimo' is still what I'll want at the end... also, it's very deeply ingrained habit, being exactly what Maitimo wants..."
"Then it sounds the century as described wouldn't be a fair try of the concept of life without Maitimo," Sigyn observes. "If I were faced with this set of options I'd pick 'find a farther-off world to wander, learn a new skillset somewhere outside even the faintest shadow of any of these people', but that might not suit you either."
"Crossed my mind. I - have family back home. The best thing to do is probably to make it clear that I won't get any communications about what happens to them, then Maitimo won't have reason to try anything, but wandering off to have no effect on the world I've spent my life trying to protect seems. A little hard."
"There is that. Though it doesn't seem like the society of powerful meddlers - is there a name for the whole collection of Loki and her alts and all their powerful meddlesome friends, I haven't heard one - anyway, it doesn't seem like they're much inclined to let you go have effects on your world anytime soon."
"Well. So it's a century of having no effect on your world from within their orbit and having to deal with all the horrified Maitimos and so forth, or a century of having no effect on your world from outside their orbit and being far away from all this nonsense, or convincing them that going home to your Maitimo really is exactly what you want and you don't need their meddlesome rescues, or some clever fourth option we haven't thought of. Which of these seem more and less appealing?"
"Well, I can put in my recommendation that they not do that. Can't say how much weight it'll carry. Plenty with Loki, she did after all specifically bring me in as an expert - although I think she was imagining I'd do a little more commiserating and a little less seriously considering whether or not you'd be best served by going back..."
"It doesn't strike me that way," says Sigyn. "It is what it is. If you go have your century and learn new skills and make your own way and then come back and say you really do want to go back to your Maitimo, I'll argue for it with the peal and I won't be horrified and I won't feel like I'm doing you a disservice. In fact I think the real disservice would be meeting that request with 'oh, clearly you weren't out there for long enough, go live your life some more and come back when you want the right things'."