"Is there anything behind the drifts of former-server dust because I went as far in on eyesight and reflexes as Maitimo went on memory and I can hit something forty miles off, if there's something forty miles off who doesn't want to be shot at."

"There was a mountain and a forest and a lake with a giant squid in it. I was actually reasonably careful not to choke the lake with dust when I was destroying the servers."

"Ooooh I wanna talk to the giant squid."

"...Talk to?"

"So there's no actual chip-loaded mindreading, firstly because yikes and secondly because human thoughts are complicated. But the people who were trying chip-loaded mindreading successfully got a result they considered totally useless, which was the ability to read animals' minds! And I thought this was fantastic and got it and the reserve installation and now I've more or less got osanwe-for-animals, only you can't do language, you have to do concepts, unless they're really smart animals by default, and it takes forever to figure out how to use..."

"Oh, wow, that's really cool."

"So gonna go say hi to the giant squid, never talked to a giant squid before."

"I will come with you to make sure it doesn't accidentally get silica dust knocked in."

Squidwards. He pauses awkwardly by Cam. "Uh, obviously you had a really awful time of it, and I'm going to completely ignore that unless you want me to do something different because I'm pretty incompetent at talking to anyone more complicated than a giant squid."

"Ignoring it is fine," Cam says.

"No, it's not actually fine, but realistically I'm not likely to do better by trying awkwardly. ....Huan's super huggable and usually that's my go-to but I'm guessing under the circumstances you really don't want to hug Huan. We'll be back in a bit."

Squidward, again, a bit more reluctantly.

I apologized for being insensitive about it at one point and he said he was dramatically deprioritizing his own feelings on the matter and I reframed it in terms of my own well being and he actively prefers to avoid taking his feelings into consideration, apparently.

I mean, as far as methods of self-flaggelation for holing a planet go, refusing to tell people how they can cheer you up is a pretty mild one - I'd be more worried if he'd asked the bar for howeverfuckingmany drinks it takes to get a demon drunk...

Well, no more than for a human if we let it, and literally no amount will affect us if we don't...

Convenient. Anyway. If he wants to be sad it's way above my paygrade to change that. 

Coerced into genocide really is a higher scale of problem.

Yeah. Like, my default for complicated social stuff is 'we need a Maitimo', but this isn't even that, this is 'we need a time machine. And a Maitimo. And probably Olórin.

Olorin?

Maia I knew who's very - levelheaded, and would probably tell him that it was the right call and courageous.

Getting that from someone who probably has an alt who died on his Valinor would probably be either really helpful or the exact opposite.

Thus why we need a Maitimo too.

Yeah.

And he flops next to the water and Huan flops next to him and he starts singing to the giant squid.

Quendi singing sure is nice. She sits down and keeps an eye on the dust.

The squid peeks a huge eye above the surface of the water.