He wonders if being visible is more expensive than being invisible. Perhaps; now he can see his hands, and he holds them in front of him; now he can see his feet leave barely-present imprints on the grass. He has no scars, in addition to being uninjured. Did they think that would make this more plausible?

"Look," she says, "let's go ahead and make your assumptions a little more explicit. You think I am a figment of the Enemy's imagination and that for some reason he's decided to present himself as a wildly implausible otherworldly woman who hasn't finished her teleportation spell yet and therefore has to rescue prisoners by turning them into birds even though this is not the most efficient way to shrink or transport people. You are choosing to manifest this belief by doing things which are really annoying in the case that I actually am this implausible person - this implausible person with your best interests at heart who rescued a couple of prisoners without knowing who in the world they were, I remind you - yet will not inconvenience the Enemy much at all. Can I ask you to make better-balanced tradeoffs? I don't think you can ruin the Enemy's day by figuring tasks that are difficult for me are trivial for him and then making me do them anyway. I do apologize for being so implausible but there's nothing I can do about that."

He raises an eyebrow. "You request that I not run off, because that makes no difference assuming you are an early iteration of some rescue-scenario trick but is inconvenient if you are actually in fact a rescuer who turns into a bird? Now that I am visible I am visible from the location where we parted. I refuse to believe that I significantly inconvenienced you. And you are welcome to cease to be inconvenienced by me by going away. Would you like a tearful expression of gratitude first, so you can experience closure on the whole adventure? I cannot think of any drawbacks to offering one. "

"You are not visible from that location, I have dramatically inferior eyes compared to a Quendi - missing two colors, deficient in distance and detail by at least an order of magnitude. My hearing is worse too. It took me as long to find you as you spent visible." She transforms, falls into step beside him. "I do not require emotional catering but a little practical consideration would be nice. I don't want to go tell your loved ones that I found you and rescued you and then you went missing. We're only a few hours' walk from Angband and if you wander in the wrong direction - or in any other, for that matter - you may, in the case where you were actually rescued, run into orcs I haven't rehabilitated yet and wind up recaptured."

"What I have on me are a weapon I cannot replace if something becomes of it even once I have the means to go home, and a weapon with a finite supply of poison in it which I cannot replenish until I have the means to go home. I can see about getting you a knife from somewhere else, although I don't think the suggestion will be very popular. Speaking of things you can be gotten somewhere else, someone could bring you food - maybe leave it somewhere so you don't have to talk to them; or arrive with the understanding that you don't think they exist and only want to discuss the weather but might still experience some benefit from having conversations now and then - but I can't carry much of anything while a bird and all other means of travel are slow."

Does that mean crowd scenes aren't difficult, or is she expecting he'll refuse? "I would be happy to settle near some Elven community I have not seen before. I can acquire my own food, but would enjoy conversations about the weather with as many personalities as you care to animate."

"Okay. Next time I'm visiting your family to heal orcs they've caught, or in Doriath, whichever comes first, I'll ask around about settlements like that, although unfortunately a lot of people are - fairly reasonably, considering the mind control, I guess - suspicious of people the Enemy has captured and not willing to stick their necks out absent personal affection or some sort of proof. It's hard to come by. You might want to move in with the rehabilitated orcs, actually, they're going to resettle when I've found them a place." Pause. "I convinced your father I wasn't the Enemy in disguise by demonstrating my native language. I don't suppose you can also determine if languages are related by listening to them for a while? I can turn my translation magic off."

"When and how did you interact with my father?"

"Would you like me to just tell you the story of my life while you refuse to react to it in in any way? Then you can monitor me for inconsistencies and I won't have to backtrack every time I want to explain something."

"That sounds like a pleasant use of a few hours of my time, and you obviously worked very hard on this backstory; it is elaborate. Go ahead."

Loki laughs, a little, and proceeds to explain (with visual aids) Asgard and her family and culture, the Tesseract and sorcery and the spells she made, her discovery and supposed exile to Midgard and her arrival on the ice without her friend. "Findekáno doesn't think it will help convince you this isn't a hallucination to hear that he's alive, but he is anyway and I have most of my contact with his group via him, so I'm telling you now rather than awkwardly talking around it -" She arrived too late to save most but she saved some; when they left the ice she visited their cousins; Fëanor was the charming nerd that he is; she sought advice and healed him to keep his oath in force and because Maitimo himself was not present to step in with all his much-made-of-competence if he wasted away; orcs; Doriath; the disappearance of the smoke - "And you were there for the rest of it, but last night I went to see if anyone could identify you and the other prisoner - I asked Findekáno because your family was mid-festival that night and I didn't know it was you and had only mediocre news in the case that it was so I didn't interrupt. I still don't know who the other guy was, but." Shrug. "He seemed to know where he wanted to be going. I hope it wasn't off a cliff but I didn't want to leave you."

"Thank you. Do you know where he might have gone...?"

"He has gone nowhere and is shackled to a cliff in Angband. And no."

"Maybe we could condense the sentiment 'I still think this is a hallucination' into something nice and short," mutters Loki. "So as to otherwise retain the flow of conversation." Sigh. "Your family doesn't know I fetched you yet. Findekáno isn't sure it would be best for them to be able to find you; I think he suspects that they'd be able to convince you to - act, produce intellectual work, etcetera - and he's rather torn over wanting to put you somewhere comfortable and leave food on your doorstep and then go back to being extremely emotional about everything in between, versus wanting to get you where he imagines you'd in fact want to be conditioning on this not being a hallucination, which is according to him working in your family's interests. This is all a little complicated by the fact that he doesn't know you didn't participate in burning the boats. One of your brothers told me but said he wouldn't confirm if asked and said I shouldn't tell Findekáno, which I haven't... Findekáno asked me what I'd want in your position. I'd want enough information to build parallel models, one of the world where everything was a lie and one of the world where it wasn't. He can't guess that you might want that because he thinks you can't possibly care about lying that much after all. What a fucking mess."

"Well, you'll notice he didn't insist on charging up here with me even after he'd gotten your location out of me. I'm not sure how long you think the conversation took but it didn't ultimately slow the host down, whatever he came up with that he didn't follow through on." She shakes her head. "Maybe I should leave you mostly alone while I work on my teleportation and then take you to another realm and get you a fucking therapist, Quendi don't care much about a century here or there, right? I'm not qualified for this. Although I'm not sure anyone actually is and you'd probably hate therapy, so. I don't know where to find you a community of escapees and have no idea where Rodyn went so can't suggest you start one. Do you want to plan to join up with the converted orcs when they settle somewhere, do your research from their colony? They might be a little irritating about their new religion but you'll have no previous experiences - well, positive experiences, I can't guarantee that you won't have encountered any of them before - and they'd probably benefit a lot from having someone around to show and tell them things that wouldn't be remotely novel to the Enemy."

And she can do an orc crowd scene more readily than an Elf crowd scene, she has plenty of orc models present who she can order around as needed. He'd wondered what the point of that subplot had been. "Yes," he says, "I'll consider that."

"All right, I'll consider that the default. If I can find you once they're on their way, anyway."

"I don't want to tell you where I'm going and save you the trouble of simulating the whole area, but I would be happy to tell you where I will be in a month."