"I didn't think through all the implications enough either."

"Do exactly what someone would want you to do' is incredibly dangerous, it's honestly lucky we found out anything about the situation before he realized my evil alt wouldn't want him sharing."

Nod.

"You are uncomplicatedly a good person."

"That's not what 'uncomplicatedly' means."

"And at this point we have to ask ourselves do we respect Findekano's preferences, because if we do then Evil Maitimo psychics it off us and maybe forces Findekano to say he wants things he doesn't want or maybe he alters what Findekano wants and he cannot be allowed to have that as a tactic to use against us but on the other hand if we're doing this on Findekano's behalf it is pretty shitty to not care what he actually wants..."

"We could get a not-fucked-up version and ask him what he'd want under the circumstances."

"It might meaningfully change even relative to our sensibilities about what he 'really' wants after centuries of oaths and conditioning and trauma."

"Getting a Findekano probably means forking one without their consent but might be the best option we have anyway."

"If my alt succeeded through centuries of oaths and conditioning in getting him to really want to be his slave, I don't think I do respect that preference."

"That's not what I meant, but there might be details even another Findekáno can't predict."

"Yeah."

"I feel like Edie should be osanwëing Findekáno sometime when 'Midnight' is down here for food and thus accounted for but I don't know what you should say..."

"Neither do I. Especially considering that practically speaking, we have one shot at this because he's going to have to tell him..."

"I am just guessing, even if I saw his face I wouldn't be sure, he has a lot of reasons to have figured out how to lie to me specifically. But if he's not currently under motive-distorting oaths I think he's going with some model like "I am going to have to deal with him at some point; even a century of borrowed time in the meantime isn't worth it if it means he will be angry and feel betrayed and therefore tighten the leash when I come back, the best thing to do is to be very apologetic about having inconvenienced him by telling these other people about what was going on and to take advantage of his temporary reluctance to tighten the leash right now when it'll anger these powerful people we're living with"."

"I'm reading a lot of - discomfort with uncertainty - which should accordingly discount any plans that involve visible-to-Findekáno risk-taking insofar as we can afford to care about frightening him -"

"I wonder if it would be useful to have interactions with other patrons in front of him that involve demonstrating that yes, rape is A Bad Thing and most of the multiverse knows this that don't involve bringing him up as an example so he has room to not see it as an attack..."

"Is he confused about whether he is being wronged or just about whether we have a plan to change it that doesn't make everything worse..."

"I'd think the latter but it's hard to be sure."

"It was not obvious to him that it'd be to Midnight's disadvantage to have it widely known - I also think the latter, but not with exceptional confidence - we don't have a way to stop him from talking to Midnight, so we can't just tell him things we're planning -"

"...Maybe if we told him we could tell him the things we were planning but only on a releasable oath not to tell Evil Maitimo? Since Evil Maitimo doesn't get the information either way he should probably be able to swear that?"

"Don't want to do that if we don't have him in our hands, if the oaths do contradict somehow -"

"I don't think I know enough about oaths to know why it should work like that at all...?"

"Yeah. Ugh. And we'd be trusting that Evil Maitimo couldn't psychic it out of him anyway..."

"The general principle with oaths is that if you swear two that are both demanding different actions in the same moment you're fucked, never ever do that, I suppose now that retrieving an earlier fork is an option we can carefully test what actually happens if there were a really good reason but it'd have to be an excellent reason. 

Things like closing one of several avenues to do something are thus incredibly risky - if I swear to be outside in an hour, and then swear not to walk there, I will be fine right now because I can also crawl there or ask to be carried or something, but if it gets close to the designated time and there's no one to carry me and a barrier to crawling, ouch, contradiction. 

Things like failing to open new avenues to do something are less risky - if I swear to be outside, and then swear not to fly there, I'm fine even if non-flying means of getting outside are inaccessible, because I can't fly. If I swear to be outside and then swear not to use your teleportation magic to get there, and then get your teleportation magic, I technically think that parses as permissible but who the fuck would ever test that, you'd have to be insane."