I hate that table anyway. Please do eat something, you're - running on magic more than normal, I think.

I'll try.

She does. She tries significantly harder than she's inclined to try for her own sake. She eats maybe half a plate of food, and watches people, and tries to believe that she's invisible.

This is hard because they look at her sometimes, but not, like, the whole meal or anything. Alex lurks against a wall and paces. 

Existence is so oppressive.

Anyway. They seem fine. Reconnaissance successful. She waits maybe ten minutes after she becomes pretty sure that she's gonna fail to get any more food down, and then leaves to head back to her room.

If he considers objecting to this he doesn't do it very visibly. She is not impeded in returning to her room.

Awesome. More... moping on her bed, probably.

The infuriating thing is that there isn't actually anything wrong. There are no more crises to sort out. Her baby is fine. She continues to have no relationship with either her or the random American soldier who portaled in here, which is the situation she was in when she landed. The only way she's worse off is that she's going to hell now, and this is hardly something that's being inflicted upon her against her will. So it's stupid, really, to be this sad, because nothing is any more lastingly wrong for her than it's been for probably billions of other people. There's no point in going around feeling like her heart's been cut out. It barely even reflects reality.

How do the depression songs work?

Uh, there are different ones, you could try them out and see which ones have effects you like. Some are more for energy and some are more for inner peace and some are more for joy, and so on.

I guess energy could be OK. Not that I have anything to spend it on, so it's kind of whatever. Inner peace sounds like not a good enough description to know whether it'd be a good thing, and joy feels like it'd be kinda - I dunno. I don't need more pointless feelings that don't reflect anything.

It seems pretty likely that your current feelings, uh, reflect something. 

Nothing's even worse than when I landed here. Technically. Except the hell thing. And the feelings.

Your child is dead.

Yeah. Well.

It didn't, like, do anything to me, though? Like, - she's fine, she's in heaven now, she ran her very short race, she's happy and a hero and it'd be selfish to take either of those away from her, and if we landed back home tomorrow it's not like anyone could tell, it's not like anything would be different -

I don't want to, like, talk you into feeling worse about this than you already are, or anything, but, if you are upset and just think you shouldn't be -

I don't know.

I feel horrible all the time for no specifically discernible reason and I'm locking all of my other feelings in, like, combination-lock feelings boxes so they don't get any amorphous horrible on them, and normally when there's a bunch of amorphous horrible I just kind of keep doing things and eventually replace some of it with other stuff, or else talk to someone relevant about whatever the problem really is and get it sort of semi addressed, but you can't really address anything that happened because it didn't actually leave anything super obviously broken, it just made me feel like - a broken container that used to hold something really awesome and it's done with that now and its story is over and there's nothing more for it but it was cool enough once upon a time that we're going to keep it around as a museum piece, or something, which is stupid, because everything I think right now is stupid.

- because you're grieving, because your baby is dead.

Well, it sucks.

- yes!

Losing Mom and Dad didn't feel like this.

So, like -

Elves in Valinor conceive of separation from a child who is underage as the greatest and most tragic harm imaginable. Because it's the only thing that can't be fixed, eventually, with more time or patience or character growth -- the child will grow up, they'll be different, your chance to have been present for their childhood is gone forever.

And I guess humans don't have that thing in particular because there are so many things wrong in human worlds. But - 

I feel like it's. Different. If you wouldn't have created them in the first place.

I don't think so?

Humans kill their babies that they didn't want all the time and if one of them was sad afterwards I wouldn't be like "well you didn't even want them so get over it".

It's not that I didn't want her, exactly? I feel like that's different, too.

Sometimes I have the thought that I want her back. And then I remember that I - also really really don't want her back because if I had her I'd get horrible on her and maybe drag her down to hell with me.

That seems kind of unlikely but I guess maybe a sure thing's better than not? And we're not going to let - we're going to figure out how to make you immortal and then God can never have you and it doesn't matter what he thinks of you.

I kinda don't believe you? But - thanks for trying. A lot. 'S really good of you.

Do try. 

I guess you do a lot of dangerous things. Probably you should stop that at least until we've got it straightened out. But - I don't think it'll take that long, there's so many kinds of magic and probably some way to exploit how some worlds run faster than others.