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"Look," he begins, "not that I expect I'd find this convincing in your position, but -" and then the ground shimmers under them and half a second after that it's not there at all.
They fall.
The ground they hit instead is cold and muddy. The stars are exceptionally bright, and close overhead.
" - what?" says Ryan.
Alex doesn't answer him. Alex is looking out into the darkness, horrified.
"We can pay attention to what orcs are thinking about over the next couple weeks," he says, and then blinks at his sheet confusedly. "- I don't know why we would, though."
"This seems to be my fucking business since it's happening in the room where my girlfriend just gave birth to our daughter. I thought you were going to leave."
"What? No, Alex, stay, we are having an important conversation here, you just don't remember it because of the short-term memory loss. You have a paper that explains." Also she's not Ryan's girlfriend but that seems like really not a thing to focus on right now.
She writes her chain of reasoning out:
- We did a spell to seal Melkor away.
- We don't know whether the spell worked.
- We need to see whether Melkor is still doing Melkor things.
- People should mindread orcs for a few weeks to find out whether he is.
He reads her paper. He reads his paper. He rolls his dice. He rewrites his paper on a new sheet of paper. He rolls his dice again.
"There's a spell that seals Melkor away?"
"Yes. I think this is the... fifth or sixth time you've said that. We already did the spell. We don't know if it worked, but we have a plan for finding out if it did, it's on one of your papers."
"OK. Concern - if you mindread orcs, are you going to remember to tell me what you find out? Because I think I am not a person you would normally tell, but I think under the circumstances you - should maybe tell me what you find out by mindreading orcs."
"Can you add that to the sheet where you explain the logic for mindreading orcs?"
"Yeah." She frowns at the paper and rewrites it.
- Karen did a spell that gave everyone except her short-term memory loss, and that might have sealed Melkor away.
- We need to see whether Melkor is still doing Melkor things.
- People should mindread orcs for a few weeks to find out whether he is.
- People should tell Karen what they learn, because everyone except Karen is experiencing short-term memory loss.
"Is that short enough?"
Yes. I've communicated to everyone that they should do this, and that they might routinely forget, and that the instructions are untrustworthy and they should stop if it seems to compete with anything else or affect them negatively.
"Yeah. And - leave you be - I'm so sorry this happened the same day as you had your baby -"
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