"I would like to hallucinate that you are not talking to me."

The enemy does not seem to have noticed that anything is amiss; there is no great stir in the mountains behind them. But the plains stretch on for at least thirty miles with no obvious cover.

After six hours or so the Elf speaks. "In this hallucination, I can walk?"

"You can even run off into the yonder like the other one did, although I will try to tell you first where we are relative to various things before you get out of my extremely pathetic osanwë range so you can find somewhere you'd like to be and not wind up in Doriath pincushioned with arrows or similar. Would you like me to put you down?"

"Yes."

She puts him down.

He stands. "Where are we?"

She sends him an osanwë map - "you are here" six hours updated. "Is my guess; I haven't updated from the air and I don't have eyesight as good as yours."

"Thank you. I am going to find the nearest object of sufficient height and jump off it; will you get in trouble with your master for a failed test?"

"I will presumably be met with despairing loved ones when I find out who you are and who I have to notify that you are dead after all. I don't relish the prospect. Perhaps you could bear with me long enough to get where we're going and then decide if you want to kill yourself."

"I assume that the information your master so desperately desires from this iteration is precisely how I will react to the sight of my loved ones, and what I will find suspicious in the manner that your puppets purporting to be them will respond to me. That is precisely the information I am therefore disinclined to give you."

"Okay," says Loki, "then why don't you tell me where to find some people who don't know you, but who might be able to give you a place to sleep and wait out the standard duration of your mind control episodes? I have no permanent residence, myself, and unless you're actually from Doriath I doubt they'll let you in, but there are locals I haven't met, maybe they'd suit."

"This is your hallucination; I assume that whoever you desire that I should meet is just over the next hill. There is no known upper duration of your master's abilities."

"I was taking you to Fëanor's people, because they're closest of people I know how to find, and it is hours away yet. If you'd rather go to the Nolofinwëans I will have to walk all night to get there, or stop at Fëanor's and borrow a horse, but I can take you there instead and it will take longer and I will be up all night but I'll do it. If you're from some village I've never heard of in the forest or something I can take you there too. If you want to learn to fly and go to fucking Valinor, well, I don't know if it's actually open to flying visitors or not, I've heard it's closed to boats, but I'd have let you try it if only I weren't so sure you'd dive directly into the sea and drown. It certainly sounds very unpleasant to spend the rest of your life assuming that Moringotto is just really really patient but at least you will not be dangling from a cliff face being routinely tortured; I can't help but consider that an improvement."

He looks almost amused. "I am from a village you have never heard of in the forest, five days to the south."

"Well, this is going to be really fucking tedious, then, isn't it," she says. "This way, I'll stop at Doriath for directions if you don't want to be any more precise. I am afraid I will have to turn you into a bird or tie you up or something while we're near it because otherwise you might commit suicide by trigger-happy archer and I think this would strain my tenuous diplomatic relations." She turns Doriathwards. "Does he fake osanwë too? Can't just think at your family and friends from here? What the hell good is a telepathy ability that can be spoofed, what a rip-off."

"Since you control all of my sensory input, you can also fake osanwë convincingly. I agree that Eru should have designed Elves to be more resilient to the torment of his deputies. I would like to hallucinate not being tied up as we approach Doriath and will walk a little faster towards my home village if you will agree to this."

"Are you going to wander off while I'm sleeping or into the path of the trigger-happy archers?"

"My suicide ends the hallucination. You are right that I prefer waiting this out until the Enemy grows bored and ends it to ending it myself and launching into whatever he has planned next, as long as by waiting it out I don't give you anything of value. I don't expect that a walk through the woods will give you anything of value, so I have no particular interest in ending it prematurely."

"If this is a place where I can live alone without contact with others, I will happily do so not just for the next few weeks but for the next few centuries. If you come back declaring that my relatives found me and insisted on seeing me, I will lie back down and stop reacting to you or to 'them' until you cancel the hallucination."

"Well, I don't know who lives around here but if they do so very nearby it's not obvious. I can turn you invisible and you can sit up in a tree if you want to avoid whoever wanders by. I'm really not equipped to handle you in any more sophisticated way, most of the orcs I have met are less frustrating than you and they will probably have you outnumbered by the time my appointment rolls around, and I suspect you're lying to me about where you're from because you have no way of knowing which villages I have and haven't heard of yet five days' south. I'll have a bit of a flyover and see if there's a better place to put you for your extended introversion than right where I happened to get fed up but that's the extent of my patience right now."

"Very well. Thank you for the diversion."