"...good point, no, I don't think so."

"I don't know if it'd do much to disseminate the information - or if it'd be believed -"

"Might complicate Midnight's narrative. I don't even know if that's a valuable thing to be doing."

"Suppose I could ask him."

"...you think that'd help?"

"I'm not sure. He was perfectly civil, which might or might not add up to producing a useful answer if I asked him 'so is there a reason your Rúmil thinks none of the jumpers understand the significance of not handing out the teleport'."

"I suppose whether or not he gives a useful answer is itself somewhat useful information."

"To the extent we can distinguish a useful answer from its absence, yeah."

"We could run it by one of the non-evil alts of him who doesn't find the topic upsetting?"

"Yeah, might work."

And more logistics and more planning and more delightful borrowed magic.

(They get a space Maitimo of their own. He moves in with Prince Ferardrin as soon as he's handed off his projects at home.)

Awww. And what does the convenient newly local Maitimo think of directly asking Midnight this question.

"I expect we'll learn something from the answer, at least."

So Boots writes Midnight a letter about what the citizenry of Evil Arda (she is contemplating pitching alternate names for it, what does he think of Shadow) have been told about the jumpers in light of the Rúmil's missing information, she would certainly understand if he hadn't prioritized being very complete about making sure everyone knew but it seemed like this omission was significant to Rúmil's understanding of the matter?

Shadow seems nicer than Evil. Around here it's considered very rude to share that someone was a prisoner of the Enemy, most of them don't want to deal with the scrutiny and the distrust and the pity that comes with it. So I have not disseminated such information about anyone, jumper or local, and won't without being told by them that they prefer I do so. (Incidentally, your alts would have hurt Forever very badly by telling the peal all about it at once; I understand this was to some degree necessary so everyone'd understand their reaction to me but I hope they're at least aware that it was a very serious wrong to him by local norms.)

And she forwards this to the imported Space Maitimo (Leaf, this one is Leaf), footnoted But Forever told Elspeth some things of what seemed to have been his own volition and had short hair until Cam fixed it so I'm not sure I buy that part.

(This one is Leaf to Bells, everyone else still calls him Eight). Yeah, if it's true that's a horrible thing by local norms it's a horrible thing he did apparently without social penalty.

I have the impression that while the exact extent of their recovery is privileged information the fact that your alts were in Angband is not especially?

It would be kind of hard to keep a secret.

So that's a practical matter and not one of preference?

I assume they aggressively pretend to be fine for reasons that would also apply to pretending it hadn't happened, if that were achievable.

So I can't just tell Midnight that they'd sooner have everyone know, or something, but I could mention Kib, he's okay if people know, would that help?

The letter says 'without being told by them that they prefer I do so', I expect if you say Kib prefers it he will say "Kib is welcome to tell me that".

Would it help if Kib told him that, or would we then get some campaign of differently discrediting jumpers because one of 'em is a rescuee, or...?

Depends what he wants. I can't tell if he is trying for the moral high ground because he expects his people will side with whoever appears to have it or if he sincerely believes any of it or -

- I keep trying to imagine how I'd feel about it if someone'd showed up on our Arda, before the war, and declared something - I don't know, 'eating meat' or 'not removing kids' pain receptors' or something - it's kind of convenient how every world so far has ethics tidily consistent with mine, I have no trouble believing there are actually alien societies out there - anyway, declared something we were doing to be totally and obviously abhorrent, and explained we had alts but none of them did it and they had amazing magic and tech which we couldn't have because we were evil, and didn't even understand why we were evil which was additional proof we could never be trusted not to be -