Lacking non-negligible information, couldn't tell you - it was never a priority for me to come up with a plan for this - Loki'd probably have a better idea. I take it back, it might actually be best on the condition that you can pull it off and that you do have to be able to re-derive it like that. Which he did.

And one is lucky enough that the Enemy can't lastingly remove or tamper with their memories. There are other considerations, but it certainly - serves, sort of. Can you fix it?

As far as it goes, I think so. I'm not sure where to go from there but it should get him thinking.

I'm tempted to suggest introducing Elspeth at that point but it seems as likely to hurt as help.

Wouldn't risk it.

I've been considering whether to get my memories tampered with until I stop believing this to be a hallucination, perhaps we can debate the merits of doing that together.

Loki's one of you doesn't think it's a hallucination any more but I'm not sure how well the method replicates. You might respond better to Elspeth than one of us would, actually, I'm not sure, I'd want to ask him. Elspeth is our alt Bella's daughter and she has a magical power to tell the truth convincingly. She'll be swinging by to turn your Valar into remotely reasonable people soon anyway.

If I believed this were real and the war were over and I weren't necessary I'd kill myself. Is the one you're referring to not done with his war?

No, he is. Uh. No Elspeth then, I suppose.

He raises an eyebrow. Kib wouldn't rather I keep thinking I was in Angband. No matter what I wanted once I was free.

Well then when he's walking around having opinions again he can go invite Elspeth over for dinner, I don't own her, but I'm not going to fetch her for you if the likeliest result is suicide, okay?

At least talk to Maedhros first.

Do you need anything else to get to work on Kib.

We'll want to talk to his husband a little bit, otherwise not so much.

So he walks with them over to Aydanci and Kib's quarters. Findekáno's there too.

"Hello. Have we been explained."

"Yep. Pleased to meet you. Kib hasn't shown any inclination to attack people but the golem will restrain him if he does - do golems recognize alts as such -"

"No," Maitimo says. And he sits down on the bed next to Kib. "Hey, Kib. I'm really sorry about this."

...Kib opens his eyes.

Kib is confused.

"...this is the part where he's trying really hard not to wonder what you're sorry about, because anticipating it won't make it less unpleasant especially in a condition where he can't brace for it effectively. He recognizes me and doesn't have a cached response to that, nor to what I'm wearing, which must look pretty outlandish; but my voice'll sound wrong because it's not coming from inside his head, which he may not have known if he doesn't come from a culture of sound recordings being common so it'll seem like an obvious mistake, maybe just obvious enough that he almost thinks about it to see if he can derive with negligible effort what it might be supposed to mean -"

Kib is not happy.

He stares at Cam like he's an alt of the objectively best person in the world.

"He doesn't know how long we can keep this up, and going back under sucks so he's going to put off coming up as long as possible, but this hasn't happened before, he is having trouble reducing what we're saying to meaningless noise - probably the fact that it'll sound like his native language helps. Doesn't have a way to be sure that this isn't a dictionary attack, because the dreams're unpredictable... Do you have an idea how much dreaming there is left to do?"

"He's filling in the last - bits and pieces from Aly's life," murmurs Aydanci. "The Enemy couldn't take them and Lórien couldn't restore them. He may be done in a year or a few years."

"So not so much that we could reasonably be hoping to hide key deletions from him if we let him sleep; it'd be a gamble, and as long as he has the rest of this incarnation without any missing time he knows there's nothing else to hide them in, and if Aly dreams are indelible places to hide things while he has access to unbroken memories of this incarnation are running very thin."

Kib puts his hands over his ears.

He watches Kib.

"Wow, voluntary actions to affect his stimuli!" says Cam loudly. "That only took about two minutes! I assume he's been operating under the assumption that if the Enemy has him all options to affect what happens to him are manipulative, illusory, intended to derive information about him, or all of the above, whereas if the Enemy doesn't have him he can trust you to present him with food and protect him from miscellaneous hazards and avoid giving him sensitive information and all he has to do is not get in your way, he's been going metaphorically limp. And yet you are letting us talk even though he's visibly unhappy about us and wants us to go away and let him get back to implementing his minor strategic triumph! I told you he'd be cranky."