I will, he says, settling into the lovely solid feeling of facing a really meaningful challenge. You're perfect, you know that?

All right, time to find information on demons. And the Internet. He knows how to look things up on the local computers, he can start there, go bother his parents in Nuime if local resources are insufficient...

May I have my soul while I'm jaunting around the multiverse? he wonders. I don't know what happens if I'm multiple hops away from it for a long time.

Sure. I'm in my audience chambers.

So that's where he goes.

I might look into subtle artists too, while I'm out there anyway, he muses. How much control do you want to have over my schedule while I'm working on this - should I avoid being out of the world for too long...?

I'd like you to check in once every few days, because I worry about the peal hurting you somehow.

That's fair. Although Taliar himself is... less worried than that. The peal sounds fairly manageable by his methods, from what he's heard.

All right, I will.

Here he is.

Here's his soul. 

He takes it. He puts it on. He grins at Maitimo with utmost delight and adoration. He's still pretty fucked up, and now he has a big complicated problem in front of him and only the faintest idea how he's going to get from here to solving it, and it's exactly what he needed and it's something most people wouldn't dare to lay on him like this and Maitimo knows him so well and cares about him so much and he's so happy.

Have fun. You can do it for Nuimë after you understand it, too, I bet they'll like that.

I bet they will. I'm going to be so smug at my alt.

And he goes off and reads background information for a few hours and goes to sleep.

Predictably, he dreams of Nahira.

It's the worst it's ever been. She stalks him through the halls of Seofar's castle, pins him to a wall, kisses him deeply while he struggles and cries, and then his clothes are gone and her hands are all over him, and he is alone and powerless and no one will ever come to help him—

Sigh. Where is Taliar's soul - now it's in his hand again.

Intense overwhelming relief. Maitimo has him, he's safe, he's okay, everything's going to be okay - he loves Maitimo so much, he is so glad Maitimo is helping him like this - he wants to burrow into the feeling of his presence and stay there forever.

Awww. Taliars are pretty addictive, he will concede that. He asks around if anyone has a ring for dreamless sleep. Couple people do; Angband.

He brings it in, lets go of Taliar's soul, waits for him to recover his senses.

The awful sick shaky feeling comes back first of everything. Then his senses, then his thoughts.

He looks up at Maitimo and smiles wryly. "Hi. Thanks for rescuing me."

"You may continue to require rescuing if you're going to continue to be adorably grateful about it. I have a ring for nightmares."

"I love you," he says, sitting up. "Thank you so much."

Ring for nightmares.

Ring for n—

—nope.

His soul flares with soft silver light. It tells him that, much as it would be useful to him to have this, and even though it can't spare the power to duplicate the effect itself, being under persistent externally imposed mind-altering magical effects is not a thing that should be able to happen to him. So now he has that protection from hostile mind control power he's been suspecting was waiting in reserve.

"...in hindsight I should've expected this," he says, "there must be some reason my alt doesn't have one of these and 'they think Nahira dreams are fun' is not quite a sufficient explanation."

"...it's not even mind-altering, it's sound-sleep. I don't understand your soul's objection - would it protect you against drinking tea before bed, it's just a stronger version of the same thing -"

"I can sort of see its point, I think. If it had the power to spare it would just start suppressing my nightmares for me, but it doesn't, and - souls aren't aware, they don't reason, it's not exactly thinking about what it's doing... I hesitate to wonder this in case I end up losing my eidetic memory necklace, but it let me have my eidetic memory necklace, so 'persistent externally imposed mind-altering magical effects' can't be the precise shape of the objection..."

He attempts to interrogate his soul on the matter. Does it just approve of him having trauma reactions for some reason, what's going on here?

"...huh."

Apparently dreamless sleep as imposed by this ring would be subtly harmful to him in a way that his soul could avoid if it arranged the same effect. Eidetic memory is just eidetic memory, and its pitfalls are permissible because they're avoidable isolated incidents rather than an integral part of its functionality. But messing with Taliar's dreams like this would in fact mess with his head.

"Huh. How or why, can you figure it out?"

"Not easily. I suppose I could ask the subtle artists, they might know something about it or have a way to find out, but my soul isn't a good source of information, it might not have more detail available than that."

"I ask because lots of survivors of Angband use them."

"The fact that it'd mess with my head doesn't mean it'd mess with everyone's. And it doesn't necessarily have to mess with my head a lot for my soul to deny it - like, if having nightmares about Nahira makes me get over the flashbacks a tiny bit faster, I'd still probably make that trade so I could reliably sleep at night, but my soul wouldn't because it doesn't weigh priorities the same way I do. But yeah, I'll ask the subtle artists."

"Sounds good."

"And in the meantime I guess I will have nightmares," he sighs, handing the ring back.