"Wow, you can really tell that he hasn't picked up a notebook in years, that wasn't even quippy."

"Alright, I think you have bullied our Kib back into the world of reasoning beings, did you mention having a way to make the Valar reasonable?"

"Elspeth does it, but apparently we're not introducing you yet, so she'll just pop in by Taniquetil and then leave, I guess. Kib probably doesn't require round the clock supervision but he is out of practice and when he's in a better mood he'll be able to sort of use us as prosthetics, so we'll probably want to be around a lot for a while - or Bella, or Loki. And we'll tell Maedhros where to find you."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Sigh.

"Bye."

And the visiting Bells disappear and drop a note to Maedhros that he may wish to swing by.

"You need anything?"

"...Me?"

"Yup. You once tried asking me if I was okay, revised to 'worse than baseline in a way I can do anything about', sound familiar?"

"My memory is not the problem here."

"Do you want them to come back and do your thinking for you? I think I know you pretty well but I don't think I can quite pull it off myself. You're trying to think of another strategy, right? Got anything? I suppose if it takes this long to come up with it's already useless..."

"Sorry, when did this go from being 'do you need anything' to 'how about I make fun of you', I feel like I missed that transition."

"Your alts seemed to think this might help, and you haven't suggested anything else. I can do compliments if you like. It was a brilliant strategy, your alts couldn't think of a better one given the constraints."

"It's a hell of a set of constraints. They told you mockery would help?"

"No, they were making fun of you themselves. Not entirely fairly, either. It is one hell of a set of constraints, isn't it?"

"If I understand correctly they think it helps if they do it.

Yeah."

"Cam can create arbitrary objects. You can have your notebooks back if you want them."

"What, and you let him leave without getting them?"

"I was sort of expecting it to take a little longer.

That wasn't mockery," he adds hastily.

"Taking it as a premise that this was real, what would you have wanted us to do?"

Sigh. "I meant it when I said you could do what you wanted with me, I was a writeoff for my purposes, you could shuffle me around however suited you. Hopefully you weren't expecting me to be all chipper like in Lórien, because then you'd be tragically mistaken about how to evaluate what suited you."

(Aydanci is quietly crying on his shoulder. Kib pats him.)

"It suits me to hallucinate that you're thinking. Which you are. So I definitely did what suits me."

"We just wanted you back."