Meanwhile, Kib takes up computer programming. It's similar enough to servant programming to use some of the same skills, but different enough that even if there's some cryptography going on in here anything he writes up from "hello worlds" to a calculator program would be garbage if it were stamped onto a shine or etched onto a golem.

His alts observe that his thought process is at this point "wow, the Enemy is REALLY committed to this bit, or I'm just... out". They're not wrong. It is simply not something he can rule out, that the Enemy is really committed to the bit.

Cam gives him a chip and a chiplocked computer and at that point it is definitively guaranteed that he's out - or that the Enemy can, as he has always assumed, read his mind. The Bells could be unreasonably elaborate finagling of some kind. The chiplocked computer really, really can't. It does as he wills, it does this even if he maintains his private thoughts distinction because it doesn't care, it just... well, it's a marvelous convenience, for sure, makes it pretty effortless to read through Cam's notes when he learned to program and means he doesn't have to learn to type, but it definitely means he can't assume he's maybe in the custody of a non-mindreading Enemy. He mentions this to Island.

(They have gone home and been visibly married. They decided to proffer no explanation at all. The King's family had all made it known one way or another - in one case by shouting it in the square - that as far as they were concerned the King could have who he pleased. Findekáno's family was concerned for their son, and not speaking to the King, but there'd been more crying than shouting. 

People'd talk for a few Years and then get over it, Island says, and seems fine with that.)

"Maedhros also doesn't think he can. You are wholly entitled to laugh at me for thinking that even bears mentioning."

Kib doesn't especially feel like laughing about it. He shrugs. "It's almost cozy, the extent to which the setup's logic would have to break for anything particularly unpleasant to happen."

"Most flavors of unpleasant, at least."

"Yeah, most flavors. I suppose it's not impossible in-scenario for me to be kidnapped by extradimensional aliens or something, but at that point why set up all the everything about the people who are unlikely to kidnap me, etcetera."

"And the teleport makes it at least very hard for that to be a realistic scenario." He's gotten it indelible, like Maedhros'. 

"Eh, not necessarily, there's a few dozen kinds of magic flying around and something could interfere, but it means it'd have to be more convoluted."

"And extradimensional aliens would have less reason to want you."

"What worries me isn't really that something will happen, it's that something's already happening, that I'm somehow mistaken about what things constitute useful in-hallucination work, that comments over breakfast to my husband or learning to make a virtual turtle draw things are - via some contortion -"

"It'd have to be quite some contortion. ...if he were trying to figure out how to make someone convincingly impersonate you, maybe, but the golems wouldn't recognize them, we'd see through it at once."

"How good is he at impersonating me already?"

"Usually tried to avoid needing to, much, you were too busy or I was in too poor physical condition. The first time, the one I believed wholeheartedly, there were a few interactions he had to iterate quite a lot - I kept asking you what was wrong with you - second time fewer iterations but I also knew not to express when something struck me as off."

"I'm actually really curious about that but would more than understand if you didn't want to say."

"No, it's fine. What specifically -"

"What'd he get wrong?"

"Didn't think the right way - you know, I have the necklace now, I could just -"

An unremarkable generically pretty Noldorin room. Maitimo's not yet well enough to get out of bed. 

"Hey," Kib says. "We missed you."

"LIkewise," he says, and fakes a smile. He's not good at it yet.

Kib sits himself down on the bed next to him. "You okay? We got in as fast as we could -"

"...yeah, I'll be all right."

"Invented a new warservant model to do it. Better designed for Angband."

"- is there something I shouldn't know, about what's going on -"

"Huh?"

"I'd rather be told 'we're keeping things from you because you're too fragile', or 'because we don't know yet what the Enemy's done' - instead of everyone just acting funny around me -"

"Am I acting funny?"

"It's admittedly an awkward situation. But, yeah."

Reset -

"Hey," Kib says. "We missed you."

"LIkewise," he says, and fakes a smile. He's not good at it yet.

Kib sits himself down on the bed next to him. "There's a lot of stuff we're going to keep from you because we don't know yet what the Enemy's done."

"Of course."

"If you have suggestions -"

Maitimo's eyes flutter. "Nothing's need-to-know at least right now, it'll get harder once I'm better - you should be looking into other cases, figure out if there's any way to have me doing anything more creative than weeding the fields -"

"Oh, Maitjmo, we wouldn't make you weed the fields."

"Better than being useless."

"You're not useless."

Maitimo blinks at him skeptically. 

"...oh, that's weird. Yeah, I see what you mean."

"He got better at it -" A later iteration -

"Hey," Kib says. 

"Hey."

"I don't know if talking will be a welcome distraction or not."

"Go ahead," Maitimo says.

"We're trying to figure out why people sometimes come back in his thrall. Haven't had much luck tracking down former prisoners, have talked with a lot of people who talked with them - we're assuming you're not keeping thoughts private from him, and we're assuming you might snap and try to kill us, those are the only failure modes that there's basis for worrying about but I suppose it's possible we're not being paranoid enough -"

"Could have sworn something," Maitimo offers. "Could have generalizable mind control. There's the prophecy where I kill all those people -"

"The war'd look pretty different if he had generalizable mind control. Can you - swear you didn't swear anything -"

"Yes, but that just means I don't remember it, it'd still be binding if I'm reminded of it - also, you shouldn't ask me that -"

"I can verify with Findekáno later," he says.

Maitimo relaxes slightly. "Golem to make sure I don't snap and try to kill anyone?"

"Yeah, good idea..."

Blink. Maitimo's brow creases -

Reset. 

Kib enters with a golem. 

"Hey," Kib says. 

"Hey."

"I don't know if talking will be a welcome distraction or not."

"Go ahead," Maitimo says.

"We're trying to figure out why people sometimes come back in his thrall. Haven't had much luck tracking down former prisoners, have talked with a lot of people who talked with them - we're assuming you're not keeping thoughts private from him, and we're assuming you might snap and try to kill us, those are the only failure modes that there's basis for worrying about but I suppose it's possible we're not being paranoid enough -"

"Could have sworn something," Maitimo offers. "Could have generalizable mind control. There's the prophecy where I kill all those people -"

"The war'd look pretty different if he had generalizable mind control. Findekáno says it only helps so far if you swear you didn't swear anything, could be he has a way to make you forget that you did."

"Yes. I can at least swear that I don't remember any, but that doesn't even mean there are none currently operative, if you swear yourself new goals and then forget swearing it you've still got the new goals -"

"Is it absurdly optimistic to just believe that you wouldn't have done that -"

"I believe I wouldn't have done that. We can't plan on that basis. The golem's to stop me from snapping and trying to kill you?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

"...I have no objections."

"I guess we probably have pretty much the same information, on the question of whether you're safe."

"I swear that I don't believe any of my goals and motivations differ from yours. ...you could ask that one every day, or I could swear to tell you if it changes..."

"Which just brings us back to 'he might be able to see and hear everything you're doing' as the main constraint on bringing you up to speed on everything."

"Yeah. Not worth it, at least not yet, I assume the country's being competently governed in my absence."

"...more or less."

"Oh?"

"How about I just say that figuring out whether it's safe to tell you more is an important priority, but until I do you shouldn't try to learn more -"

"Is it time-sensitive -"

"Yes."

"The Kingship -"

"Yeah."

Maitimo blinks. "...sorry, I shouldn't have asked - you shouldn't have answered -"

Reset, just that last bit - 

"Is it time-sensitive."

"...no comment."

"- sorry."

"As soon as we figure out what we can tell you, we will."

"I know."

"I should get back to work - I love you, I missed you -"

"Love you," Maitimo echoes -

"That was, I think, after forty tries? Notice how I was always visibly confused at you before he started over - that's part of what convinced me, though it obviously can't convince you, that he can't read minds..."

"Yeah. I was... I mean, he tried stuff like that with me when he had a gap in my memory to work with but sometimes instead of looking confused I noticed I was confused later, writing it out... Even in some of the parts where you didn't cotton on he's got my phrasing wrong, the body language's surprisingly good but I guess he got plenty of it to look at and it wouldn't necessarily be conspicuous to copy-paste..."

"And I sometimes noticed something was oddly said but it wasn't enough so, absent any reason for suspicion, to jump to 'this isn't Kib' - he must copy-paste the body language, Valar are supposed to be bad at that..."

"...he did a terrible Aydanci, usually wound up with me only able to see him when he could basically loop him being really groggy in the morning and not having to do anything but mumble and drink tea. When he didn't just roll me back enough that I wasn't interacting with him yet."

"Why's that, do you think?"

"Might be that he couldn't read Aly memories and my earliest available understanding of what he's like is from when I was her?"

"Makes sense. So are you assuming a sudden astonishing jump in his Aydanci-imitating capabilities, here?"

"I have to assume lots of sudden astonishing jumps to not just go 'welp, apparently that was that'."

"Maedhros was there fifty years. He had nearly a hundred of them. None of them extended more than a year past the end of the war - not that that's evidence, obviously -"

"Obviously. Like, even the incompetence with me early on could be deliberate underperformance, let alone secondhand reports."

"Maedhros has a sort of project of - everything that happened to everyone who's willing to share it. So he can piece together what the Enemy was trying to do to him, what we can do for others. You are welcome to read it or contribute to it. The only people who can read it are people who were there."

"...may do, although my information'll be outlying with the dreams."

"Yeah.

It'd be useful to talk to the space ones but that'd involve making them exist again and that hardly seems fair to them."

"Yeah. Why would they be specially useful?"

"He could do more time dilation. Couple thousand years, subjectively. Whatever his endgame with us was we'll hopefully never know, but whatever his endgame with them was, he'd have gotten there. And it'd have to be different, since he could only sort of release them - he could give Cam the chips, but the one time he did that Cam wasn't stupid enough to reembody who he'd got - but still, I don't actually understand him and I expect it'd help fill in some pieces of the picture. At an unacceptable cost."

Nod. "Might have been different, though, alts do differ some and we don't have a really close read on whether that one might've."

"And differ more across worlds - like, Maedhros and I are the same person with a point of divergence, the space set are - well, recognizably us, but less subtle differences. And then there is the evil alt. I wonder what it'd even look like if the Enemy had an evil alt. Maybe somewhere he has a good alt. Who will totally understand when we kill him anyway."

"I would not totally understand if someone had met some evil Bells and then ran into me and killed me anyway, honestly."

"You're not a god, the cost of being wrong is a lot lower and 'supervise you' is feasible as a solution."

"Yeah." Sigh. "You up to date on what Evil Arda Findekáno did, by the way?"

"Yep.

Apparently with a parting request we not kill his Maitimo, which is a pain because I think we probably should."

"There is the point that singling him out for special treatment is questionable. If we justify it as him being dangerous in any non-tortuous condition, maybe, but not just because he's personally offensive..."

"I think he's dangerous in any non-torturous condition. Contact with people is really all he needs to hurt them and/or leverage them into more power, and we can't deny him contact with people."

"Which we could fix by having him around sufficiently resilient and warned people which is difficult because he's personally offensive..."

"And because I bet the only thing constraining him from faking a very convincing repentance is that he's barely met any of me and not spent long around anyone who knows me and doesn't know what it is he's supposed to be faking."

"Is that something we should be specifically watching for, making sure he doesn't learn how to fake being less evil?"

"I am sure he will learn how to fake being less evil given sufficient contact with not-evil people, we just need to kill him even though he seems not evil anymore."

"I'd really like to think of something else."

"I know. Maedhros doesn't even endorse this solution. 

Have you thought of anything?"

"No, not really. If his thing were going around hitting people with sticks it'd be easy, stick him in Limbo, but..."

"He would probably pick a couple thousand promising people and make their lives very nice and get them working on worldleapers. It's what I'd do."

"Yeah. Can we consider any promise of non-evil credible? I mean, he still doesn't have free will..."

"He could swear to just be his best extant model of the rest of us, but that's just a particularly creepy form of execution. Anything else, I get the sense he's better than us at oaths, he's been using them more readily for a lot longer..."

"Bella's husband can do mind-reading, if we wanna go there, but that only works if he happens to be thinking about how he intends to loophole the oath right then..."

"The way I lie to people is by putting myself very much in the mental and emotional position of someone it wouldn't be a lie for. I'm not sure surface mindreading would generally parse my lying as such."

"She's also got a lie detector on retainer. But I don't see a reason to think that'd work any better than the song."

"It should be possible with enough supervision to keep him from doing anything catastrophic. And I'm not sure how generally inclined to keep sex slaves he is, Loki and Elspeth were under the impression he wants his back rather than to have another one, but the game he was playing there is very hard to prohibit with an oath -"

"I'd really expect the oath to hate himself as much as Elspeth does to do more heavy lifting than it seems to."

"I guess it's useful to know that I'm fairly functional through self-loathing. Also Elspeth doesn't go around simmering with loathing for him anymore, though she'll probably start again if he pulls some tricks with his current task of making himself deposable -"

"I wonder how that's going to go. I mean, it's not like he's the only evil person there, anyone who could be in charge instead might not be - personally offensive, but -"

"Will probably do worse at running the country by most conceivable metrics. Maybe one of my space alts will want the job."

"Would they be as good at it on any metrics other than personal inoffensiveness?"

"They'd be just as good as it once they had all the relevant personal connections and history and reputation. They're technically more capable than I am, their mental magic stacks a little better. I'd struggle with a kingdom of a billion in some ways that they've rather taken in stride.

The problem is that those personal connections and history and reputation are all millenia in the making."

"Yeah, exactly, you don't just lead, you embed."

"And if asked to unembed myself by people powerful enough to insist, or to kill me whether I'd done so or not and leave the kingdom to fall apart - I could at least just hand it off to someone reasonably capable, my people not being inclined to civil wars, but his apparently are -"

"We might have to live with being personally offended."

"You want to just leave him in charge?"

"I lack an unambiguously better idea."

"Well, it's good to know how much license I have to be evil before anyone will wonder if I ought to be running things."

"I might be the only person in the loop to whom 'evil version of you' is not a complete shock to the system as a concept."

"...yeah. This time with your brain turned on, though."

"I still remember it all and I've been picking at it, contextualizing."

"I appreciate at least the absurdity of saying 'I'm sorry' - is he very convincing at imitating me -"

"He does a pretty good you. Had you for a while."

"Yeah. Were you - I suppose you wouldn't have thought it wasn't me, since you wouldn't have been thinking -"

"Wasn't usually, no.

I still recognized you though."

"Do you want to talk about this or is it just a suitably adjacent distraction from talking about my actual rapist alt."

"Sorry - mind wandered."

"I mean, I don't mind. I - know the process, of unpacking and recontextualizing, I am happy to help in it if there's any capacity in which I can. But. 

Even the first time when I didn't have it available as a hypothesis I didn't think it was really you, and there's a world a few jumps from here where it really was me -"

"It isn't you, unless we want to start assigning me the genocide of the Space Maiar."

He sighs. 

"I just made myself run through everything again and again until the imagery felt fake just from looking at it so much, and then I told myself, not really them, not really them - I doubt that's the best way to do it but eventually it sort of worked -"

"I think I have less of a difficult job than you - I remember it but it's only information in retrospect and I know it isn't information about you, or them -"

"Anyway, I wonder if I should go talk to your evil alt or if that would be futile."

"It might be futile. Probably could not hurt. It's not as if we currently have any plans that rely on him not getting a better idea of how to pretend not to be evil..."

"We likely to come up with any such?"

"The only one that I can think of would be 'genuinely redeem him somehow' but I'm not sure either how that would be achieved or that we have good reasons to do it - other than special scrutiny -"

"Genuinely redeeming him somehow would be nice but we don't have an instruction manual on hand."

"I don't really have a strong sense of what'd be involved. He regrets it. He doesn't seem to - be incentivized normally by that regret."

"Are you normally incentivized by regret?"

"...come to think of it, probably not? I can only list a handful of things I regret and I either set them right or figured out what I'd done wrong and adjusted to not do that or if they were merely awful but not wrong, set it aside as not useful to dwell on. I should ask the space alts if they regret the part they played in Valinor's destruction."

"What are you incentivized by, generally?"

"People? Wanting to see them realize their potential, wanting to have their trust, wanting to do right by it once I have it?"

"So your alt's probably running on some - warping of that."

"Wanting to get exactly the responses he wants from them, wanting to have effectively arbitrary power over them whether it's sourced in affection or oaths or what."

"You speculating or are you confident of that?"

"I haven't met him but it seems the obvious - it's the same thing, if you remove the element of concern for peoples' wellbeing -"

"Wow, we must be really frustrating for him."

"You mean because he can't do anything about us?"

"We are not dispensing desirable responses and he's probably not best pleased by his only power over us involving holding his kingdom hostage and being expected to dismantle that leverage."

"Yep. I expect he is very afraid and very frustrated - which is a terrible position to leave one of me in for a decade - I am actually pretty bad at people having power over me, even when they don't hate me and I'm not totally at their mercy -"

"...this likely to lead to especially bad uses of the hostage kingdom?"

"It's obviously not what I'd do, but I don't know, maybe - "

"Well. Not checking on him for ten years seems like a bad plan and if I won't make anything worse..."

"Yeah. Probably a good idea." 

"Any other insights I should bring with me?"

"Something to stab him with?" He sighs. "I don't have anything else, and I think about it constantly."

"Constantly? I feel like you could improve on that by going and feedback-looping and that's not even productive."

"It's like when I learned destiny says I'm a mass murderer. Makes me second-guess everything. People smile at me in the hallways and I calculate whether, if I ordered them to drag my husband to me -"

"You've got a lot of very generic credit accumulated."

"Exactly. And suddenly instead of being a source of pride and reassurance and a resource to use to give you a planet for a birthday present, it's -"

"- yeah." Sigh. "Well, if it's any consolation if you told me to drag Findekáno anywhere I would ask him if this was some new and exciting manifestation of a kink thing of which I had not been apprised and even if he said it was I would tell you that you must have me confused with someone who can in fact drag people places."

"I would ask you for a golem that did what I said, and I'd have a perfectly reasonable justification for wanting it."

"Well, in my current state I wouldn't wake you a fresh one and you'd need a really compelling excuse to deactivate the standard safeties, but yeah, that you could probably get."

"Or ask Lári so I wouldn't need a separate golem if I wanted you - you're right, this is less productive than literally anything else I could be doing -"

"Yep. Go do something else and I'll go meet your evil alt."

He does that.

And Kib makes a few hops. He brings a Charp; he can teleport but that only helps if he notices someone's hostile.

The evil Noldorin empire didn't get much demonic help rebuilding after their war, and so the construction is underway the old-fashioned way. There's a palace. It's very pretty, if a little more inhospitable and symmetric and full of uniformed guards than is typical of Elven palaces.

Is this a good time to see the King or should he come back later?

The King will see him. The King will dismiss his servants and raise an eyebrow at the Charp and sit down. "I take it you are another alternate universe of Cam and Loki and Bella."

"Oh, I thought my disguise was brilliant. This isn't time-sensitive, incidentally, I can come back if it's a bad time to talk."

"It isn't, particularly. Something to eat?"

"No thanks."

He opens a box of chocolates and eats one, contemplatively. 

"Can I help you, or is this a social call?"

"Both? Neither? Everybody is very confused about you and it would be better if we were less confused but I don't have an agenda written up for how to make progress on that."

"I have several, but they're all rather constrained by not knowing when you'll next drop by or who you'll kidnap when you do."

"Interdimensional communication is actually not a well-solved problem even for people we routinely want to catch up with. I do not have plans to kidnap anyone today."

"And yet if I introduce you to a boyfriend I can't help but feel like the abduction plans will suddenly materialize."

"There are all kinds of deliberately provocative things you could do and that is one of them. I'd probably get somebody else in if you did that, though, to the extent I have a comparative advantage here it's 'not finding you a completely unprecedented concept', not 'forensic relationship analysis'."

"Not finding me a completely unprecedented concept?"

"I was in an Angband for a while and the Enemy's got really sophisticated hallucination capabilities and terrible hobbies."

"I'm sorry to hear that.

We have procedures to help escapees of Angband but they mostly depend on having anticipated the possibility before being captured, and also the ones for humans were never as helpful."

"I'm a weird case anyway, and that's not what I'm here for," shrugs Kib. "- I'm Kib, by the way, if you also have the names thing."

"...thank you. You know yours?"

"Yeah. His nickname's Island for disambiguation purposes."

"How are those chosen? Do I have one?"

"You are as a group terrible at picking nicknames, so I named mine, Maedhros just uses the Thindarin rendering, and Loki needled Maedhros into naming the Space ones and the other one has a different name anyway, and we've all just been calling you Evil Maitimo. I don't anticipate a lot of resistance if you have something more tasteful in mind."

"I should like to be Midnight and Findekáno should be Forever."

"Those are cute, although of course I have a suspicion I wouldn't think so if I knew why you picked 'em. And the relevant Findekáno is not accessible to comment on his nickname, he skipped off a few dimensions away with one of Loki's friends so that scary powerful people would stop looming over him."

"One of Loki's friends?"

"Not an alt of anybody, just some guy from her planet she thought he'd get along with who might be able to hold a non-weird conversation with him."

"He's perfectly capable of non-weird conversations, most people just ask for an appointment instead of kidnapping him if they want him in a productive mood rather than an obedient one."

"Well, next time we find a fucked-up Arda I guess we can try that. Anyway, Loki's friend found him someplace where it would be really inconvenient for any of us to track him down and off they went."

"...okay. That's good to know. He won't object to the nickname."

"Noted."

"If not believed. What are you here for, your alternates set me a very frustrating project that has been eating all the time we're not devoting to postwar reconstruction."

"I am considering the possibility that this place is, being evil, actually obnoxious enough to govern that letting you do it is worth it compared to any of the more superficially palatable alternatives."

"It's not going to have a civil war, assuming you give me the full ten years or at least five of them, it'll just be - well, optimized for 'stability when interdimensional visitors want arbitrary power to depose the leader without complications' instead of optimized for economic growth and security and a healthy and happy populace..."

"In some places designing political systems to survive sudden absence of leadership is not optional in the first place, but your point is taken."

"Oh, there was a plan in place for if the Enemy killed me, we'd be fools not to have that and he'd be more inclined to try. The difficult part of the problem is that you and your counterparts are going to find anyone in this world objectionable, so I had to have something stable over repeated extradimensional meddling, without just incentivizing everyone to provoke their political enemies into the sort of atrocities that most readily prompt extradimensional meddling..."

"So what's the setup?"

"Parliamentary democracy! People form parties around interests of theirs, and then everyone goes and casts a vote, and seats in parliament are awarded in accordance with the vote, and then the party with the largest plurality stitches together some alliances to get a governing coalition and selects from among its members a head who does most head-of-state functions, and who you can murder as often as you get the itch without significantly disrupting anything, since even within his own party he won't be particularly beloved and the balance of power won't be substantially changed. There are term limits so no one's meaningfully anything resembling a King. 

Growth'll suffer, infrastructure'll suffer, research funding will suffer. But, you know, most people won't bother running the numbers, and it's far more palatable than letting someone you dislike run the country."

"...I'm not sure if you just find it relaxing to vent about that or if you think you're accomplishing something or if this is a genuine expression of confusion on some level or what."

"I am very confused by you and what you actually want and I find it very annoying to be called 'the evil Maitimo' by people who want to casually kill a couple thousand civilians every year through neglect and mismanagement because it bothers them that -

- if I'd just killed Findekáno none of you would have even the slightest hesitations about adding me to your merry galaxy-traipsing band of self-righteous troublemakers -"

"Well, it would have been harder to notice you'd done that. We almost missed the actual problem. - I realize you're kind of operating on a limited number of models of non-evil people here but I'm still really puzzled by how much trouble you're having modeling us."

"Do you want to tell me about what you and your alts do with your lives when it's not 'show up, scare the Enemy into going off to torture people when he'd stopped, glow blue, hear rumors from the Valar, and then obsessively supervise me and my boyfriend for twenty minutes of panicking to make sure we don't get a kiss in before they kidnap him for his own good, then lament that they can't murder me on the spot because the country'd fall apart, give me a decade to change that, leave, do not communicate at all for several years?'

Because I can tell, for example, what kind of people you'll get along with conversationally, but no, I don't have the faintest idea what motivates people who act like that."

"...have you not heard the explanation for scaring the Enemy off?"

"I heard it. I don't blame them for that, but the Enemy being free and torturing people is upsetting to me and contributes to my general profoundly-unimpressed impression of you and your friends."

"I do keep saying 'we' but for whatever it's worth I was not one of the gang at the time your world was found. People've probably hesitated to give you any information they don't directly want you to act on right then since my template kind of models yours as being just about psychic, Bells are not so much people persons - I imagine that since you're not literally psychic this is frustrating. I could tell you the story of my life but it'd involve a lot of filling in mostly irrelevant background about my world and gushing about my husband and stuff, I don't actually know what you need to know to form a more well-rounded impression."

"We're not psychic. I know people well because I've known them for a long time, I have lots of reference points for most people and understand them very well, I generally like everyone I meet, I cannot look at someone and see what stories they tell themselves to sleep at night and I find myself unusually unmotivated to try given, you know, the circumstances under which we met. I'd like to hear about your husband. Tell me about your husband."

"His name's Aydanci. He and I are both reincarnated which is a rare unexplained phenomenon in my world, Stork; in our first lives, I was a girl, which matters not a bit on Stork, but came in handy when we wanted to be openly married in Valinor. He's brilliant - he and my Arda's Fëanáro came up with what eventually managed to kill our Enemy, I was pretty much out of commission at the time - before that his specialty was golems, like this one but smaller and less complicated," he aims a thumb at Charp, "specialized to deal with diseases and so on in our home world. My first incarnation died of a particularly nasty disease. It is gone now. That was him. He is the only person I've ever heard of with a rational sexual orientation; as soon as I had enough of my first life's memories dreamed back into place to know where to find him I turned up on his doorstep and he took it astonishingly well. Enemy murdered him in Valinor. Found his reincarnation, my you found him some nice Elves to raise him back up to adulthood, I waited, he got his dreams..."

He's nodding slowly. 

"And eventually we resumed being happily married, again, and then the Enemy got me and I was at least according to the conceit of where I find myself now rescued and thereafter passively catatonic for some time and he demonstrated his bottomless willingness to kill things that hurt me whether they are poxes or evil deities. And then my alts showed up and dragged me out of catatonia and I'm trying to be a very good husband because he has been very long-suffering indeed."

"It sounds it. Where does hopping over to talk to the evil Maitimo fit in?"

"Island doesn't think I'll make anything worse and I think not stopping by occasionally to see what's going on seems like a bad plan and our current lack of plan seems like a worse one."

"Do you want me to swear I've been working on transitioning the kingdom to a parliamentary democracy as described and for the reasons described and haven't done much else that I would understand to upset you."

"I didn't come here with a list of things I wanted you to swear. I mean, you can if you like, I suppose, but I'm starting to think that your understanding of what would upset me or us is not so great and that this may be significant to the whole Why Is This Arda Evil problem."

"I'm starting to get a better picture. By 'evil' - can you break down the differences between this world and the ones you're considering the standard, non-specific to me -"

"History of a standard Flat Arda up to Loki's insertion point - I showed up earlier than she did - is - let's see, do I have this in writing -"

He digs up history notes on his computer (thank you Cam's demonic habit of making sure everything is written down at least once even with an eidetic memory) and presents what he's got on Elentári history.

"Huh. Okay. Yeah, differences start at least as early as that early Elven history by Cuivienen looks a lot like early human history - tribes would raid each other, there were cities built and sacked and burned to the ground and kill-all-the-men-and-married-women -"

"...my world doesn't have that particular convention but yeah, a lot of the dissonance is that we expect adorable innocuousness from Elves that we don't expect from humans or random Edda aliens."

"This world's not adorably innocuous, no. If you modelled it as a human civilization you might come closer, there's no difference between human and Elven crime rates within my kingdom adjusting for age and I don't think the differences elsewhere are intrinsic. How would you treat this world if it was full of random Edda aliens?"

"Depends, is it full of alts? The other part of the dissonance is that this place breaks the inferences we expect to be able to make about alts. You have a human alt. He's just human, not evil."

"I would really like to contest the characterization that I'm evil."

"Okay, he's just human, not a rapist."

"So everyone's upset because you had this really fast avenue to high social trust and now it's broken."

"Kinda, that and you're automatically salient for template membership reasons - so're Findekános - and we can't just write you off as yet another place with problems that we should get around to when it comes up in alphabetical order or we have an especially good angle on it, you are hard to ignore."

"Trust me, we'd have been delighted to have been ignored. 

And - what does a good resolution of that look like, on your end, are they going to give me the resources to be more like my alts or not, towards what end are you not ignoring us -"

"If we knew we'd be handling this a lot more gracefully than we are. You are uncontainable as a - social hazard - in any non-tortuous conditions; trying to wedge you into some really sweeping oath that basically turned you into a Regular Maitimo would just be a creative form of execution with a useful byproduct; we do not want to upset Forever and uncreatively executing you would do that, even if it didn't seem unsatisfying as an answer on other levels; and if you just - stay here - doing your thing - then your alts and people close to them spin our wheels constantly fretting."

"Over what? I don't want their kingdoms, even if they sound like less of a headache to run. These are my people and they risked a lot more than their lives, for me, in the war, and I want to stay here and if there's something magically making my world worse than yours, fix it, and if it's not magic just some diffference in intrinsic temperament then do as well by them as I can - we don't have some necessary crime rate, with low unemployment and good options and good policing it'll be effectively negligible - I'm not going to steal their boyfriends, if you don't execute me mine will eventually come back -"

"...no, none of that is even close. The problem is more, we don't know why you are this way and, to people with functioning consciences, near-misses on being evil are disturbing, and in spite of the fact that your father's been in a room with a bunch of his alts ostensibly contemplating this problem for a while now we can't yet go 'aha, that's it, that's all, the rest of us are safe, there is no reason to expect me/my Maitimo/whoever to turn up evil one day, that could never have happened here, that is not something I need to have an identity crisis about'."

"It doesn't seem like there's anything you could do to me that'd help reassure you on that front."

"Yep. It's a problem. And yet here you are, salient whether any of us like it or not, mysteriously atypical."

"I have to ask... are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure that ruling a society of adorable innocents I would manage not to do anything objectionable."

"This is part of what worries us. But - mm - Cam wound up in a situation where he had to do some objectionable things but we can follow his reasoning and he was ecstatic when Loki showed up and fixed the fallout for him and he thinks like the rest of us and we all get what happened. This is not how you and your alts react to each other."

"Would you find it distressing if they had reacted that way, and do they value your good regard."

"I get what you're saying but I really don't think that's it. I wouldn't find it distressing if Island were better at reverse-engineering what you were thinking, it'd only start getting creepy if he explained why being a rapist made perfect sense and is exactly what he'd do if presented with some comparable situation."

"From the way you describe my alts, what they'd do in the comparable situation is 'break'. I suppose there's a sense in which that's better."

"Every now and then it is useful to be able to do that."

"These don't seem like applicable circumstances."

"Maybe. But you can't reverse-engineer your alts very well, either, can you?"

"Because I'm uncertain if they're 'me, with incentives to lie about this' or 'my skillset stapled to Forever's sensibilities.' I could model either of those, I'm just not sure which I'm dealing with."

"What do you get if you run those models?"

"Me, with incentives to lie about this, wants me dead so there's less material to promote this hypothesis to everyone's attention, or maybe sworn to be like them because this won't do anything and gives me an opening to start having nice normal relations with all of you on the assumption I'm cured and overwritten. Probably would state a preference for the former and count on me to figure it out and ask for the latter, since incentives to lie about this extend to incentives not to seem the type satisfied by creative forms of execution. 

My skillset stapled to Forever's sensibilities breaks, as I said. None of them have had their war drag out three hundred fifty years but they'd all be wishing they were dead - past some point they wouldn't be people, wouldn't want things, would just continue numbly executing on what their ethics demanded be done while wishing they could stop existing -"

"Doesn't take three hundred fifty years when a stint in Angband does it. They're recovering."

"Is it conducive to their goals for people to believe they're recovering."

"Wow, being you sounds like tremendous fun. I'm kind of operating under the assumption that one of the goals in question is having sincere relationships with certain people. If we ignore that as my wishful thinking then, yeah, I guess, but they could also just encourage the non-traumatized Space ones to fork some more and pick up the domain knowledge to substitute for them as needed, or something."

"I would be curious why they're not doing that. Anyway, I don't think I'd be better even by Forever's sensibilities if I had them myself; it's not a very stable setup. I think this country would for example be worse off by my alts' own lights if they'd been born to it."

"The country is honestly a subsidiary concern as far as the constant drain on our attention goes. So your country's not adorably innocuous the way Elf countries usually are, fine, Mitros is governing humans and nobody's giving him crap about how human they are, your personal life is the real stumper."

"They're not very separable. I asked myself if I could handle an indefinite-but-at-a-minimum centuries-long war with an Enemy good at psychological games and a people so divided it would take most of my energy just to hold them together well enough to hold off the Enemy. The answer was no, couldn't handle that. I asked myself what I'd need."

"And you came up with this answer and stopped looking."

"I'll concede the point if you think of a better one, or if we find one of me who pulled it off without him."

"Is being horrible to Forever literally the only thing you could think up? You didn't have any non-horrible way to win him back, after -?"

"I assassinated his parents? No. Or - maybe, after a very very long time, but I also still would have had a civil war on my hands if I'd let him just leave, and I certainly couldn't hold him as a political prisoner and also win him back, and I'm not sure you wouldn't find that horrible anyway..."

"And there was nobody handy whose parents you hadn't assassinated, or they wouldn't have done the trick."

"The problem wasn't 'I can't go a few centuries without sex'  and the criteria for what I did need aren't literally 'Findekáno, or nobody else' but people who meet them aren't abundant. Also picking him ended the civil war more thoroughly than anything else I could have done.

From what you've said it sounds like my alts would have known they were setting themselves up for failure and would have just miserably suicidally pushed their way through it until the Enemy put them out of their misery. If that's what goodness is it is unappealing."

"Well, some people have other things on their minds besides what's appealing, but we've established you are not one of those people."

"Nope. But, you know, given a situation where I don't expect to be put through centuries of psychological hell I can be far more flexible about which resources I have in reach, so if we're not expecting the Enemy back I'm happy to act like my alts would."

"I mean, that's... better than not... but is not exactly a foundation for solid interpersonal trust, you know?"

"I'm sorry I hurt him. I regret it. I can't do it again and I wish I'd stopped sooner. It doesn't sound like any of you have anything in mind that would create a foundation for solid interpersonal trust, so we may just have to live with 'our template's core traits trade resilience and effectiveness off against moral purity, inherently both sides of that tradeoff think the other side's repulsive and terrible."

"S'pose."

"You are welcome to propose a better solution."

"Haven't got one. I'm not actually sure how we're trading off against your alts' productivity, here - me and mine can in fact just ignore you if we decide that is the best plan, especially now that Forever's out of everybody's reach doing whatever he wants. Not sure yours have this feature."

"They're wasting a lot of time being upset about me?"

"Island is wasting - some, maybe not a lot, not enough that there are obvious tells in political operations but there are confounding factors. I assume Maedhros is comparable, the others might be fine, Iobel hasn't seemed very worried about it."

"Is there anything I could do that would help them there."

"Honestly, I would expect you to know the answer to that better than I would at this point."

"I can think of lots of things that'd make it worse but nothing that'd make it better. No one kidnapped their Findekáno's, right?"

"No one has kidnapped their Findekános. The Space ones have drama and I think maybe some but not all forks are reconciled or something but they remain unkidnapped, Mitros and Finankar were broken up for a while but are back together, the other sets are married."

"And my brothers? They all have brothers?"

"Yes, they all have brothers. Mine has a sister, too, my Fëanáro went to my world and decided to take home a random baby."

"Then they'll be okay. They can outsource the caring about their own wellbeing."

"...lovely."

"I think recommendations from me about how to value their own needs more would be counterproductive."

"Unless you have something unpredictable to say, yep."

"I don't know what the right thing to do would have been."

"I actually sort of wonder what would have happened if you'd given Forever a couple of weeks to process the assassination and then literally explained to him the tradeoff -"

"Might have worked. You wouldn't regard that as horribly coercive?"

"I mean, it'd be unpleasant, but it'd have a nod to other people not just being things you can toss around however you like without consulting them. Cam's done unpleasant stuff for Enemy-stopping purposes. Loki has too."

"But they consulted the people they were treating unpleasantly?"

"Loki did where possible. Cam couldn't warn them but it was quick, it wasn't chaining somebody to a wall intermittently for three and a half centuries."

"I asked him if he'd rather die and he did not prefer that. 'option which a person chose over a quick death' seems nicer than 'quick death', rather definitionally..."

"Would you have actually killed him? What about your psychological self-maintenance?"

"No, I wouldn't have."

"Is it possible he knew that."

"I very much doubt it, I was very convincing."

"And if this were anyone other than a Findekáno I'd buy that, but."

"My people dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night with the news his parents were dead, dragged him to me. We had an audience."

He sends the memory. Dark, of course, the people only distinguishable by their body heat, Findekáno kneeling at his feet, seizing his hair to make him meet his eyes -

I need an oath of fealty or a public execution, which do you want it to be.

That depends on the wording you want. 

"I imagine he believed I would have killed him."

"Possible. Not totally convinced. Pity he's not around to ask."

"Why, what does it change?"

"If he didn't think you'd kill him he didn't actually pick - what happened - over a quick death. If he didn't think you'd kill him he was using your belief that he did think it to maneuver as best he could."

"I don't think he wanted to die."

"That I believe. But it's also - he didn't necessarily know what he was signing up for -"

"I don't think he at any point wanted to die."

"Maybe. 'Arguably better than an unusually fucked up Mandos', do you want a medal."

"I want him to not have been secretly wanting to die, and I can't ask -"

Sigh. "I don't know if he did or not, I'm just noting that your template approximation of psychicness is in some ways better and in some ways worse around Findekános. They fill in a sizable gap in your common sense and the gap might be big enough to hide in."

"He came back."

"With you on a leash and still wearing a crown, yes, he came back."

"He still cares about me."

"Probably."

"I am not under the impression I deserve that but I need it very badly."

"Besides knowing his alts I don't have any evidence about it that you don't."

"How are his alts, are they happy, are they getting to do interesting challenging things -"

"Yeah."

"Thank you for coming here and telling me what's going on."

"You're welcome."

"Have fun deciding what to do about this terribly distracting planet. Should I keep nudging it into a democracy or are you not leaning towards 'arbitrary power to non-disruptively shoot whoever's in charge' after all?"

"I'm not leaning that way but I am generally acknowledged to be not performing up to par, who knows what the others'll think. They'd object to the characterization anyway."

"I noticed. I'm going to use it anyway until they offer up criteria for when they're going to do it, if 'the guy in charge looks like a friend of ours' is the only circumstance sufficiently upsetting that's one thing. But if our first prime minister holds that all these bad things happened because I didn't go in to Lórien for correction and that more stringent enforcement of the law - including mandatory correction of people experiencing same-gender attraction - is his top policy priority, going to depose him too? If his replacement thinks that you should be allowed to contract yourself into slavery? If his replacement thinks that interbreeding weakens the superior Noldorin race?"

"I think Vanda Nossëo's pangalactic thingamabob mostly handles this with exit rights but we don't know what's wrong with this place and are concerned it's contagious, so."

"If you're going to just murder your way on through whoever we have in charge I can try setting up an ineffectual democracy so you can rule things behind the scenes? Also why are you not considered up to par you're by far the most useful of your template."

"That would be the thing where I was in Angband for a while, coped by literally ceasing to think, still have to assume that anything I experience may be a hallucination even after my alts spooked me out of that, am still brushing the rust off my brain, etcetera."

"I'm sorry. If this is what you're like rusty you're going to be impressive once you're back in shape."

"You didn't actually meet the others at their best, you know."

"They're welcome to come by and try to impress me if they like, too."

"Not their mission in life. Anyway, nobody actually wants to commit a series of political assassinations, puppet democracy is - distasteful but would probably require less ongoing wheel-spinning - but we could actually just suck it up and leave your crown on, there are worse things and Forever's got away as clean as he likes already -"

"That'd be lovely. Can my alts cope?"

"Probably?"

"Are there things I can do that can make it easier for my alts to cope?"

"Nothing leaps to mind, at least not that would still have any signaling value if you did it on being prompted."

"If you're exaggerating the extent of your inability to find Forever to me, it'd be a good idea to tell him this, so he knows not to come back."

"I'm sure if we really needed him for something we could eventually find him but it'd be genuinely inconvenient and time-consuming, and we in fact don't have a way to talk to him without doing that unless Loki's friend decides to play messenger or something."

"Well, if Loki's friend decides to play messenger tell him that my alts have important projects and need him to convincingly recover or if he can't fake that stay out of sight or they'll mope too much to get their important projects done, and that the country's stable and his family's safe."

"...I'll take that under advisement."

"If him coming back causes some sort of interdimensional crisis he would want to know that."

"Yes, I assume so, but I'd at least consult Pterodactyl - that being my Findekáno - before putting it in terms like 'the Maitimos need you to convincingly recover'."

He blinks at him as if suddenly reevaluating something. "Yes, that's very reasonable."

"What?"

"Asking the local version of Findekáno how to communicate the sentiment most productively to mine."

"Not that, you also made a facial expression."

"You hadn't mentioned you were dating them."

"...Didn't come up. This sort of thing is why we gloss you as 'psychic', you know."

"Do you want me to walk you through your tells so you can be more discreet about it?"

"I am actually aware I have tells, back in Valinor I compensated by being really insufferably married at anyone who listened to me talk for more than ten seconds, but sure, what tipped you off."

"So, listening to you talk about your husband is actually what did it, you have a 'this is an intimate relationship I'm secure in' setting -" he tries sending the mental impression - "unsure if that'll come through clearly to someone who isn't me -"

"- huh. Okay. Not sure I know how to not do that."

"Variants of me are probably the only people who'll pick up on it, and it could also communicate close friendship it just seemed likelier that it didn't, given what you'd said earlier about rapist versions of me -"

"Ah."

"When Elspeth made it a condition of help against the Enemy that I let him go I was sad but I did not even consider letting the war drag out a day longer than it had to -"

"Yeah, if we ever run into one of you who isn't firmly anti-Enemy we'll know something is especially fucked."

"I don't think I come in that flavor. I really hate him on a level that has nothing to do with personal virtue."

Nod. Sigh.

"It is sort of related to the reason I dislike your template so much but I will strive to get over that for Island's sake."

"Is it the people having power over you thing? ...And why does Island whom you've not even met rate trying to dislike Bells less?"

"It's the people having power over me that they won't even hand me the rules for, people who don't want my respect or my compliance or my help or other things I could weigh granting them or denying them - Elspeth loathes me but I like her, she made herself clear. And if Island cares about you then I ought to care about you and that'd be easier to do if I disliked Bells less."

"But Maedhros and Loki don't cut it, or Iobel and Mitros...? Why ought you care about me because of Island?"

"I was not told about other versions of me who care about other versions of you, that'd be sufficient incentive also if anyone had bothered communicating it.

And they kidnapped mine so if I want them to treat him decently I had better be willing to put in just as much effort with theirs."

"...wow, I was not actually clear on how much you were being kept in the dark.

"We don't have him, though."

"You have made this claim!"

"Why would I be claiming he wandered off if we were actually keeping him somewhere?"

"To disincentivize me from figuring out a way to rig the Silmarils to crumble the planet if I want or if anything happens to me and then demanding him back?"

"...you're one hop from Edda, Loki can do all kinds of scary shit within one hop from Edda, that wouldn't even work."

"I'm aware. I would probably try it anyway if I thought you were hurting him, at worst you murder me and then have no additional reason to keep him prisoner -"

"Even before he skipped off with Loki's friend they weren't hurting him except insofar as being really awkward may be construed that way."

"You must be familiar with the sensation of 'peoples' words really not counting as evidence of the thing they are saying' -"

"Yeah, but I'm also familiar with 'here is the internal logic of the scenario presented, run with it until you find a contradiction'. Also, still slightly expecting psychicness."

"You're telling the truth. Your alts don't consider you at full capacity and also perhaps realized it'd be useful for the one who was going to talk to me to not know things I shouldn't find out and 'oh, he ran off far away, can't find him', is conveniently impossible to verify -"

"They don't think I'm at full capacity but I find it really unlikely they are lying to me about the whereabouts of alts of my boyfriend. They also didn't send me, just didn't tell me that I shouldn't come here or anything."

He relaxes slightly. "The overarching problem here is that I still don't know what you want well enough to be confident in the safety of someone in your custody, and I also have no avenue to do anything about that except smile and obey and hope that whatever you decide to do with me it leaves you no reason to hurt my loved ones."

"Since our original problem with you is in large part that you hurt him this doesn't completely hold together..."

"I was not hurting him when they kidnapped him; that can be reason to punish me but it's not very convincing reason to snatch him yourselves."

"You were - coasting on having done so."

"We were working on building a functional relationship out of my regret for having done so."

"I didn't actually meet Forever - my alts thought it might be interesting to see what happened if Pterodactyl and I went and talked to him together but never got around to it before he left - so any opinion I could form is secondhand."

"The day I swore to regret everything -" he sends it. "I think you and your alts would have found it reassuring to see him in that mood - he wasn't stuck, he wasn't emotionally blackmailed, he wanted to leave and he did, and then later he thought about it and decided he wanted to come back, and he did that..."

"...yeah, kinda. You didn't bring that up when everyone was having their initial freakout..."

"I didn't understand you well enough to know it'd help, and the Enemy'd just escaped and there was a lot on my mind -"

Sigh. "Denying a Maitimo enough information to convincingly fake being reformed also denies him enough information to do anything else, surprise surprise..."

"Is that why they were doing it. Well, I don't think Forever'd mind if you share that with people, if it will help them freak out less."

"Sorta planning to relay this entire conversation to Island, or Pterodactyl if Island's not up to it."

"...there's some kind of magic for memory, isn't there - and I can't have it -"

"There is, although I could also just have Charp recite it," he indicates the golem, "minus the osanwë parts, and I've also been transcribing by computer," he points at the thing on his belt.

He looks longingly at all of these things. "Figures."

"There's perks."

"Which it's not as if you're offering in exchange for good behavior."

"...I could see it eventually being convenient to have you more efficient at something and giving you a perk with which to do that and then not bothering to take it away because you haven't offended anybody's sensibilities in a while?"

"What?"

"'There is no avenue to get anything you want but we might give it to you temporarily and then on a whim not take it away until you happened to annoy someone' is sort of the attitude I am frustrated with."

"Yeah unfortunately I'm short on alternative routes that aren't 'try retroactively not having been an abusive rapist'."

"If I hadn't been you'd have found this world in ashes. Though I guess you could still have fixed it, brought everyone back except the humans and the Dwarves..."

"Loki might've been able to just roll the whole thing back to a pre-ash state, but it's sort of a pointless might-have-been."

"Yeah. I should get back to work. Lovely meeting you."

"Bye."

And he and his Charp hop away home.

His boyfriends aren't done acquiring him a planet yet but with the amount of bribery they can offer it is going pretty quickly. There are a few dozen city-states signed on and all their neighbors can see electricity and radio and Valian ecology and better agricultural techniques and so forth being implemented. Island's enjoying it; it's a change of pace from rebuilding back home. The Valar are persuaded to open the portals again. It's all going splendidly. 

Yay!

...Does Island want to hear the conversation or... not.

"Sure."

So Kib relays it.

"...you okay?"

"He seems to be operating under the assumption that the rest of us, facing what he regarded as a dilemma, would decide because of our ethics to go the 'plunge on alone' route, rather than actively preferring it to hurting someone we love, rather than not finding that sanity-restorative at all -"

"Yeah I wasn't sure how to verbalize that..."

"I'm not upset with you!!"

"I know, I know."

"He left - why didn't he just stay gone, that was the most satisfying -"

"Midnight kept referring to a model of us as having Forever's values glued on - if nobody else around had those values, if they weren't going to be represented -"

"Yeah, that'd do it."

"Handily.

Can't rule out actual fucked-up affection either."

"Can't tell from a transcript if Midnight actually cares about him on some level or is just upset at the thought of other people inconveniencing his possessions."

"'Both' is possible."

"Also can't tell without visiting the place whether he's in fact the best ruler it can have or just lying through his teeth about that so he can stay in power and keep the lovely incentive for his boyfriend to come back."

"You'd have to visit in person?"

"I mean, there are people whose determinations I'd trust, but I can't tell whether an alt of me who probably has extra practice at lying is lying about complicated policy things -"

"I don't think keeping information from him is a useful tactic so the question is pretty much can you in fact handle having that conversation..."

"If he says any of the things to me he said to you, defending himself, I will probably punch him, but hopefully he will pick up on this and not do that."

"I don't think punching him can possibly help unless you count convincing him he has the moral high ground after all as helping."

"I would find it satisfying and he would have a broken nose, both those things seem like improvements over the current situation."

"I could go ahead and warn him that you are in a pugilistic mood, in case his deficient modeling skills are not up to this prediction."

"I don't think I am by inclination a vindictive person, but - he -"

"If you can't handle this conversation I could relay the whole thing to Mitros or a Space and see if they want to run with it..."

"The Space ones might be interesting since they did, in fact, find themselves in a position of having to do something that would they-believed-irrevocably destroy their relationship and they were probably overly dramatic about it - in fact, I think the Maitimo had decided that clearly he was incompetent to do relationships without hurting people and should just never try it again - but they spent a couple months being childish and a couple decades being single-and-expecting-this-to-last-forever and managed not to rationalize their way into any abductions..."

"Okay, I can go to Space Arda and talk to whoever's on tap for random visitors at the moment."

"I might be able to do it, just can't make any promises."

"I can wait if you like?"

"It's not really that I'm going to become more comfortable with time? I acknowledge that objectively we cannot execute everyone as deserving or more deserving of it as he is, I have been civil to, and even developed functional relationships with, lots of people who are worse than him - but he looks like me and he hurt Findekáno - 

- I can recognize that he's just being Feanorian about it but also feel like that tendency is way more annoying when we're actually evil -"

"Do you want to come and not punch him in the face or not come."

"I don't know. You decide, you're supposed to be King of this place in a year or two anyway..."

"...I actually kind of really want to see how he reacts to seeing one of his alts in a nonhorrifying relationship, ideally without asking a Findekáno to interact with him, and there's exactly one way to do that, but I cannot condone punching him in the face. Can you in fact refrain from punching him in the face."

"Yes, of course. I don't think Pterodactyl'd mind interacting with him, though, or are you thinking he's going to be weird about it -"

"I'm thinking it might be a huge distraction, I'm not confident in that though."

"We could just kill him we don't always have to be reasonable and principled..."

"...yes we do."