He makes a small unhappy sound and sits down as far across his room from her as he can get. "Did they tell you that their mindreading can be blocked?"

"I already knew. I figured it out, like, last month. I knew it could be done before that but last month I figured out how to do it reliably."

"How'd you figure it out?"

"I, uh, I went to this summer camp where I knew there was gonna be - where I knew Matt Carter was gonna be? Only I didn't know whether he was really on our side or anything, at that point, so I like, started obsessively keeping up barriers - I started with this waterfall that played the same song over and over, it was annoying as heck, I didn't know that I didn't need the song. Uh, I was kind of just thinking of things that I thought might give Martian Manhunter a bit of a hard time picking out thoughts, I didn't really expect it to work. But the waterfall got to be sort of a habit when I was upset, and one night I was having a conversation with Alex, and I got embarrassed about something, I don't remember what, and I put up waterfalls, and he stopped responding to anything I said, and I ran a couple more tests and figured out that the waterfalls work.

"If you mean why did I suspect that it could be blocked in the first place, then, A, I read too many comics, and B, Alex mentioned that the mayor of Sunnydale might have figured out how to block his mindreading, so I knew it was at least something that Alex thought might be possible."

"Mmmm," he says because he is tremendously relieved that Prince Not-Carter wasn't lying and there's a way to have his brain to himself and also since they're not lying maybe they're not lying about everything else, either, which is ... differently horrifying than hanging around your room waiting to be hypnotized but not necessarily less horrifying now that he's face to face with it and also instead of saying "mmm" to everything he should be being cool, so that this girl, who has decided to have sex with him, will like him, since that'd make it at least 80% less horrible, but he's not really coming up with anything cool. What do sixteen year olds even think is cool. I have a driver's license, vampire slayer. When they invent cars I will be all over that.

- not a helpful line of thinking. 

"What made you conclude that Quendi have binding oaths?"

"Kind of a long story. So, before the past, like, hell month, or whatever we're in now, the worst thing we'd faced in Sunnydale was this one single really terrible hell day. It turned out in the end that this kid had been beaten into a coma and that his nightmares were manifesting in the town, and that he was also causing everyone else's nightmares to simultaneously manifest in town, which as you can imagine got pretty apocalyptic pretty fast. For a while we were just dealing with random terrible stuff - the school had this random talent show, one of Alex's students committed suicide in the bathroom, his brother had a sore throat and couldn't sing, my sister and nephew were found brutally murdered in their house - but then, then we had to face Alex and Michael's biggest nightmare.

"There are these weird powerful gem things, called the Silmarils. I dunno what all has happened over them, I get the sense that it's a bunch of terrible stuff. They're real, although this one wasn't, this was a magical manifestation that we didn't think to wonder about because we were all sort of operating on dream logic. And Alex and Michael - they're oath-bound to get the Silmarils, and they're oath-bound to kill anyone who withholds a Silmaril from them. I assume that this is the sort of decision that sort of vaguely made sense whenever they made it, but they regret it kind of a lot now and are just stuck with things being the way they are. Anyway, since they're oath-bound, the second the Silmaril appeared they had to drop everything and try to go get it. I didn't know what was happening at the time, they hadn't told me about oaths or about the Silmarils, so I just figured the Silmaril was, y'know, such an apocalyptic-level threat that it didn't make sense to stop and consider doing other things. They kept telling me to focus on ending the nightmares, and then they kept ignoring that to go chase the Silmaril. I can tell you more about the specifics of what happened, but eventually I ended up with the Silmaril - stole it from this terrifying snake demon that lived in a hell dimension, by the way, almost died getting it but then I cut the demon's head off and got the Silmaril and it was honestly super cool - anyway, I had it, and at some point I'd gotten into my head that maybe Alex and Michael weren't actually trustworthy, maybe the reason they were making all these weird dumb tradeoffs to get the Silmaril was that they were actually just evil and only cared about getting their hands on the shiny rock.

"So I hid it. I figured that if they were trustworthy, then they must have been making these decisions because they didn't want anyone else to get ultimate cosmic power, and if I told them it was safe then we could ignore it and focus on ending the nightmares. And if they weren't, well, I didn't want them having a super powerful shiny rock to end the world with. And so they came to me and they asked me where the Silmaril was, and I said it was safe but I wouldn't tell them where it was, and - Alex was so scared, when he tried to explain, as he was trying to give me alternatives, give me any way at all that I could feel safe about things and still let him fulfill the terms of the oath, because if he couldn't think of anything and I said I wouldn't tell him then he'd have to kill me. And I was scared and confused, and couldn't figure out in that moment whether he was trustworthy, and so I said no, and so he shot me and killed me. - I got better, obviously, and then I went and killed him and Michael back, it was this whole thing. Anyway. The point is - Alex would never hurt me if he had a choice about it. But he didn't, not then, because of the oath.

"And then I figured it out, see. The Silmaril - the Silmaril oath, having the world end up in such a way that the oath forces them to kill people, forces them to kill people they love and desperately want to protect - that's their nightmare. The idea that this commitment they made is going to force them to do horrible things again, and there won't be anything they can do about it. And they'd love to get out of it and not have to shoot me if something weird happens and I end up on the wrong side of it, but they can't.

"So that's how I know."

"Okay. 

I guess - if there's a way to verify it then I have a bunch of questions for the Quendi and a bunch of questions for you."

"OK. That is understandable."

"Do you want to, uh, go through those now, or should we wait and see if I'm happy with their answers?"

"Uh - we can go through them now I guess."

"Okay. Do you actually want to do this? Like, leaving aside that Alex says to and Alex would never do wrong by you, and leaving aside whether it's your duty or all the death is your fault if you don't or whatever, do you prefer this to not doing this?"

"Alex didn't tell me to, Alex wants to wait however long we have to wait for different humans to show up, even if that's centuries, and then just eat the cost of all of the death and warfare and torture of orcs that's going to happen in the meantime, just so it won't be me specifically. I... don't really want to do this, but I also don't want however many hundreds of thousands or millions of people to die, and I guess we don't always get everything we want."

"Okay. So, one thing that seems like it might happen is, you have a baby, and then you realize you are not okay with this baby being used for godkilling rituals, actually. How are you expecting that the Quendi would react if you decided that?"

"If that happened, then - then they couldn't do the ritual without me saying it was OK, my dog wouldn't finish telling them how."

"Your dog knows how to block the mindreading?"

"Yeah, I told him before we got here and we've both been keeping it up all the time."

"Okay. Do you have some kind of low-tech transfer solution in mind or do you want to have sex?"

"I... do not currently have any ideas for low-tech transfer solutions."

(Nice job, Karen, could you possibly communicate this in a more demoralizing way.)

"That's an answer. Have you ever had sex."

"Noooot really."

She's never actually ever wanted to have sex with anyone or wanted to kiss anyone or wanted to go on a date with anyone but she feels like maybe this information would not make this much easier for anyone.

"Okay. Then I think this is a terrible idea and maybe we can revisit it in three years when you are twenty."

" - I mean, it's not like this specific thing is going to have changed in three years. Also that sounds like maybe a lot of dead orc babies. But I can ask if they can come up with anything in the low-tech transfer methods department, I guess."

"Sure, that sounds good."

"OK. I'll - tell you when I figure out what our options are."

Paging Alex. So I think Ryan is considering revising his primary objection to 'you're sixteen and that sounds really sketchy', which means he wants to know if you guys have any ideas for.... I think the terminology we're using is 'low-tech transfer solutions'. 

I hate everything, by the way.

For - uh, would that work?