"Ideas?"

"- I'm mostly distracted thinking about something unrelated - if there's any chance we'll have a brilliant idea or meet one who was interrupted later than Luster and somehow rehabilitated without horrible ethical violations in the process, we should make sure his black hole is in the Edda or Wish neighborhood, he doesn't have to be alive in the intervening time but after -"

"...I think that'd defeat the point for him, because if we can do it someone evil could do it, but - maybe -"

"Well, even if we find a black hole in Revelation Loki's eventually going to have the generic and she's not going to stop working on that just because it implies theoretical evil ability to do it."

"'We can kill you but it'll be possible for someone sufficiently powerful to bring you back' might actually deter him from it, not sure."

"Deter him from that in favor of?"

"If there's a better way to protect himself against it happening again than ceasing to exist he'd go for it."

"Mutliverse is too big," murmurs Kib. "Very hard to weigh risks like that."

"I think about it a lot."

Nod.

"Ask him," he writes to the crystal ball, "whether 'kill them the minute we find an Arda after their suicide' or 'knock them unconscious, let Boots rehabilitate them enough to have a coherent conversation with their loved ones, have that conversation' is preferable. If he thinks it might depend on the contents of the conversation suggest he let Boots finish, have the conversations, and then let us know."

So Boots asks him that.

I - 

- a lot of the people you listed really don't care about me anymore -

- guess it does depend on the conversations -

- how long will it take you to do the rest of what you wanted to do, what kind of state does it leave me in?

Five more days for what I've done for your alts before, longer if Mandos affected anything. I can in fact do it while you're unconscious if that'd be pleasanter.

...yeah. Thanks.

Okay.

And now he is unconscious.

She gets through the rest of what she did for his alts. She looks for anything that looks... Mandosy.

No clumsy tampering. He fell apart in Mandos but from the isolation, not from tampering.

Well. The prescription for isolation is people, not subtle arts, and that can't happen while he's unconscious. The prescription for having killed a bunch of people is talk therapy, not subtle arts, and that can't happen while he's unconscious either.

She lets his various loved ones know that they should maybe be on standby. When they are she wakes him up, suppresses the headache, shows him she's doing that, she can stop if he'd rather have a headache.

Not really.

Then he can continue to not have a headache. Do you care who visits first?

I don't think so. What do they want from me -

They haven't told me. Crystal ball network, he has no preferences, who's most convenient to go first?

Um. 

He dies when everyone's done talking to him, right? That's kind of a lot of pressure. There's a lot of demurring.

Boots declines to increase the pressure by pointing out that it might depend on what everyone talks to him about.