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It is a few hours into a projected 168 of them. Haru is trying to get back to sleep while his mother holds him, because 168 hours is going to feel a lot longer if he can't figure out how to sleep while lonelier than ought to be humanly possible.
Suddenly not having his mother holding him is certainly a way to ruin the attempt.
He leans his cheek onto her hand. "Isn't sometime after becoming a world famous assassin etcetera a weird time to be developing qualms - or is this a rapport thing, you don't really need to do that because of my backlash presentation, I will talk to you regardless until you hand me off."
"And it'll be here all week, folks - is it going to take more than a week to get me wherever we're going? That would be a dumb plan, I could wind up being able to teleport and then where would you be. I mean I'd still rather not because then I'll be lonely forever till somebody figures out interdimensional transit but still. I probably won't be able to teleport, there's usually some kind of conceptual oppositeness going on and I don't think teleportation is opposite loneliness, but stranger things've happened."
"I don't have any powers yet, if I had any powers I wouldn't be using them because they'd give me backlash, and if I had powers and they were mind control I wouldn't use them at all!"
"If I had and wanted to use mind control powers why wouldn't I have used them before you hit Ari in the head and kidnapped me?"
"You're from another dimension and I have no idea what limitations you're working within."
"Are they gonna torture me to see if I'm lying, does that work in this universe like knocking people out does."
"Uh it's possible that I've been the audience of a virtuous propaganda campaign, but, like, it works in movies, the same way knocking people out does, because it's convenient for the plot, and the received wisdom on torture in real life is that people will say whatever they think might make the torture stop but if you can't actually verify anything they're saying then that's not a good way to get true information. Like, you could torture me into changing my story six times about whether I have mind control powers but this would not result in you knowing more about whether I have mind control powers, if you don't have a way to check."
"That's very interesting. You having said this will not s - I do not think it will affect whether you are tortured. I don't - think you will be. I hope you are not."
"Well, y'know, if you want to be more confident of that than you are right now this is probably the right time to take any actions about that compared to later on when I'm with whoever might or might not torture me out of whatever beliefs they might have about whether it works for any goals they want something to work toward."
"I wasn't imagining you reporting for duty empty-handed, I was - I guess imagining you could defect? Or go to ground someplace but you might be too recognizable for that."
"Hm. ...I think this will not be relevant." She clicks on the turn signal and pulls over.
She turns off the car but doesn't move to unbuckle either of them. "It seems your host had somewhat more defenses than I had initially been aware of."
"SVETKA PLEASE!" he shrills, thrashing around in the not very much give his being-tied-up situation affords.
Okay apparently the next thing he's going to try is SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN CASE THERE'S HIKERS OR PASSING CARS WHO CAN HEAR HIM DOING THAT
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