"Huh. Good for them. I'm not a convincing impersonation of my Elf alts, they're too pretty. Head on over?"

"Yeah. Iobel, you wanna come?"

"...yeah. I already dropped the snake guy off in his hometown, not picking him up for another few hours."

"Is their Enemy solution portable?"

"Unspecified. I did mention it'd be handy if it were. They might not know."

Pop through Little Valinor to where he was standing a minute ago. "These're Mitros and Iobel."

"Hello."

"Nice to meet you. Cam said that you just need to know all the specific situational factors in order to jog Kib back into having thoughts, and then we've reduced our problem to the familiar one that no one ever really believes they've escaped Angband." And to Mitros, Findekano and Kib and I were happily involved for several decades before I was captured, is this going to cause problems with either of yours from any angle -

No. Congratulations.

Thank you, he says, and almost smiles.

Okay. Why don't you all come inside and sit down and I'll give you everything you might need about the situation.

In they come. Cam fills Iobel in on the premises of his conclusion; she derives the same.

Okay. From the start, then. Kib got eaten by a giant snake. This caused him to land in Valinor about sixty-five local years ago. He was eighteen. On his world people do not have children; babies appear in hollows in the ground and so forth; he grew up in a crèche, which is how that world raises its children. In that world people have the power to create shines - he points at one - and shades out of patches of light and darkness, and to animate machines of various types. You have to program and build them, and anyone can do those, but only people of that world, as far as we know, can awaken them. They can also make animals into pets that obey their commands. We had a dinosaur cavalry and Findekano rescued me from Angband on a pterosaur but when Kib was captured we had to kill them. Kib was apprenticing in servantmaking.

Kib arrives in Valinor. He finds Elves bewildering, asks if there's anyone helpful around, is directed to me. I get him set up with a place to live in Tirion, learn about the babies, am appropriately appalled, ask what Elves can do. That's how we hatched the scheme you must have seen -

Yeah, we found this world because a fellow snake victim turned up at their palace having heard of their otherworldly magical powers saying he was from this other world, could they let him go back for a visit, and I went to scope it out first and I saw a sign directing me to Little Valinor. And then the Elf there mistook me for Kib. - You're bouncing the osanwë, right? We could also just all talk in another language and osanwë you a translation.

You're a couple years older, he was still eighteen or nineteen when my father cured mortality, but the resemblance is striking. Anyhow, after learning about the babies we learned that humans were mortal, and Kib helped my father with some preliminary experiments to try to figure out how to cure it, and then we set to work on production of things we could sell on Kib's world to fund the storks. And Kib developed a book-copying golem. And we played a lot of Governor, in the evenings, he's brilliant.

Kib had been for several years having recurring dreams that didn't fade on waking, about a girl named Aly who'd been born twenty-four years before him, lived in a different city, and was psychologically very similar to him. It was not until we realized that he actually spoke a language Aly'd spoken that we realized the dreams had to be meaningful.

There was a festival. At the festival Kib said very loudly that he was gay and Arda's very conservative and it was a disaster and I ended up snapping at him and then we miserably avoided each other for a week until my boyfriend decided to ask Kib out.

...okay, that's a new one. This is your Findekáno? Assuming the Ardas all have the same naming scheme?

Yep. At the time he was metaphorically the only sane man; now he literally is, and none of us could have gotten through this without him. Anyhow, I'd spent the last month longingly telling him things about Kib over games of Governor, and then moping at him, and he asked him to a concert and they adored each other.

I thought eighteen was too young, you know. By the local years it was even younger than that, there's only 310 days in a year on Kib's world. I was taking a stand on principle. But it was a stupid principle and did not last very long, not with Kib existing around me, not when he dreamed that Aly'd been the inventor of storks - I told him that made him objectively the best person in the world' - and anyhow the three of us were deliriously happy for a while and then Kib dreamed Aly'd been married.

Married to Aydanci, who is brilliant and worshipped the ground she walked on and who, after she died, eradicated the disease that killed her. Kib wanted him back. Kib went and found him. He was in bad shape, he'd done nothing but grieve her for eighteen years. They were delightedly reunited and Kib said, um, he hadn't remembered he was married, he was so sorry, and Aydanci said it'd be terrible for someone else to go through losing what he lost just for the crime of having excellent taste, and so. That's us.

That's really cute. No sign of Aydanci alts...?

He isn't anybody I checked for. I haven't checked the other way around yet.

You'd already have heard about him if any of me had met him. He's lovely. Anyway, we were all blissfully happy in Valinor for a Year after that, expanding the stork funding program, waiting on my father to end death, trying to avert Arda's annoying prophecies - Kib told Findekano that he loved him, and he hadn't told me, and he explained he was waiting for romantic occasions which I was far too paranoid to engineer, and so I terraformed him an island and made him a stunning little boat and we went out and watched the sun set together - anyhow, eventually we noticed that someone had been smuggling babies into Valinor. We told the Valar. The war started shortly thereafter - it's really a shame I can't get you Kib's notes, he gave me permission to read them if it helped with my recovery and I think that'd reasonably extend to alternate universe versions of him and the cause of his own recovery -

...and you can't get them because?

Sank into the sea when Beleriand did. The Enemy had the continent set to crumble when he died.

Fucking deadman's switches. Anyway. I've got them. I can conjure arbitrary material objects and specifications like "written works of my alt here" are a way I can do that, that's how I check for alts. I'm not going to read his notebooks very closely unless it turns out we seriously need them though.

After I was captured and before he was he did a private half-page and a half-page for me, so I could have something to go off, piecing things back together. That'd be the first place to start if you needed to reference them at all.

Anyway. We went off to war. The warservants do most of the fighting, but it's hard to program them to be sufficiently flexible, we had Elves to command them. I got captured. I got rescued. It was - really hard on him, what a wreck I was - and then I assembled myself into more functional form and we had the weaponry to stop Thauron and while the army was out at war he got captured. Since then he's been unresponsive except for the time in Lorien.

By "unresponsive" you mean...

He doesn't have thoughts. He will snuggle us, he will say 'love you' and 'okay' and 'you can do whatever you want' if we try getting his consent for some new attempt to help him, he will refuse to be around anything intellectually engaging and disassociate if anyone tries to be intellectually engaging at him.

Well, that sounds really unpleasant.

It's not even the literal best strategy, it would just be something he could re-derive fast on negligible information...

Out of curiosity, what do you think the best strategy is?