Alright, thanks. 

And to Cam, is this an acceptable time to talk?

Yeah.

I told Edie that I'm struggling with who I should be talking with. I am not at all equipped to evaluate right now if staying with Midnight and keeping him in check is the most important thing I could be doing. It depends on lots of things that I take it I shouldn't know because he shouldn't know them. It depends in particular on whether your Maitimo is the same and hiding it or not, and I take it that the evidence he's not is all itself things I shouldn't know because Midnight shouldn't know them.

So generally I'd ask someone I trust to go learn all the things I shouldn't and then tell me the answer. Inconveniently, there's no one I trust.

Well... I'm sorry about that.

It doesn't seem like the kind of question Bar's equipped to answer, and I can't see her answers from here anyway, and I should probably decide before the Maitimos are back in the picture, they'll be much better at telling if I'm lying to them once they have a baseline to work off so I need everything important settled before they have such a baseline.

You should be able to osanwë with Bar, she just seems to prefer napkins by default. Is there by any chance some dramatic display of not being in my boyfriend's thrall I could make that would be convincing. Would you like me to draw embarrassing pictures on his face or something.

I'm trying to distinguish between 'you two both share values sufficiently distant from mine that I can't export my decisionmaking to you', 'you two both share values sufficiently similar to mine that I could export my decisionmaking but I'm not a particularly valuable asset in those games so if I do that I can expect the right decisions to be made but things to basically continue sucking, and should work on not feeling personally let down by this', 'you share values sufficiently similar to mine I could export my decisionmaking, Maitimo's deceiving you', and 'Maitimo partnered with Sauron on a piece of jewelry with mind-control powers, or something in that vein'.

Of course you also have a Sauron, the tableau would be insufficiently horrendous without a Sauron... I'm not taking point on the 'games' because interpersonal finagling is not my strong point to begin with and even if it were I have an enormous emotional handicap in play.

I want you to be okay.

I'm fine. Edie doesn't believe me on that either. It's kind of a hard reset, coming out from under that many oaths, and he wouldn't actually find me interesting if I couldn't keep up with him, so he keeps me that way. It is perfectly plausible to me that the best play here is 'signal amenability to being won back once released, which I can't do without sincerely forming that intent because Maitimo, get released, get won back, nudge him patiently into being a great King and mediocre person', and if it is, I will be - vaguely relieved, actually, probably, I am more irreplaceable at that than at anything else. In particular if you have other versions of me. That'd be fine, if it's the answer, I just need to know before there are Maitimos up and about to infer whether it'll work.

If that's actually a thing you can do and nothing walks in the door pre-endgame that magically solves everything better than that -

- yeah, sounds about right -

Thanks.

You're welcome.

And he lies down on the grass and sings and looks at the sky until Edie's time is up.

After Edie has been in her cell for sixteen hours, eight per victim, Nechar gets up from his desk and wanders over. "Do not nonconsensually drug people," he says. "Unless it's a designated special occasion for that of some kind it falls under 'violence'. Doesn't count if you get clever with not being in the bar at the time as long as people who expected to be safe there are the ones falling over. Do it again and I throw you out. Clear?"

"...In my defense I wasn't specifically avoiding being in the Bar at the time, I just didn't happen to be, I wasn't being clever, and I accept my sentence as a fair and logical consequence of the action. Clear."

"Right then. Shoo." The forcefieldy thing between her and the rest of the office disappears.

She shoos.

Cam's still sitting on the floor by his unconscious boyfriend, now reading.

"Hi, I'm out. You doing okay?"

"Yeah."

"If we want to refresh the dose to give Findekano more time to think we have to carry them upstairs first."

"I can't carry him, I'd have to do something elaborate to get him up the stairs. And time might dilate on us anyway."

"We're demons, I'm sure we can work something out."

"Yes, we can, and as soon as we're not interacting with Findekáno anymore and he can't see us we can spend hours while he spends seconds, and are you in fact even allowed to drag your unconscious drugged victims out of the main bar in order to re-dose them, that seems like it might be rulebreaking behavior."

"Well, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be allowed to drag your unconscious drugged boyfriend anywhere. Anyway I'm planning to check with Findekano the exact contents of the oath that mean he's just standing there, see if I can carry him upstairs too."