"Me too. I suppose we could spare the children."

"This one's a soldier in the army they sent to wreck your planet," Elaneth-imire points out, "it's possible the rest of them won't be quite so zealous. Worth checking, at least."

"Oh, I think we should try a couple hundred variants on getting them into a more pliable state of mind, different songs for it - Cáno can improvise, and can put more into it than he is right now - you should see if you can manifest a power for turning off the disgust thing - I just won't especially mind if the end result is that they all want to die, because what the fuck." 

(Alien can't want to die because alien can't want anything at all, is losing all capacity to have preferences about the world.)

"...I'm all right with trying to manifest a power for turning off the disgust thing but I can't help feeling that mind control songs are a badly targeted solution to this problem," he says. "Like, okay, we mind-control whole planetsful of aliens so they stop wanting to murder us for no reason, then they start wanting to murder us because we mind-controlled them. If I get a power for turning off the disgust thing it'll tend to be nicer and have fewer side effects."

The alien's urge to die does not appear to be located wholly in its preferences - it should die because it has been corrupted by filth, regardless of what it wants.

"I don't think this scales as a fix but I'm trying to get a useful feel for what it is."

"Well, fair enough. But I think you might've broken this one already."

"All the more reason not to run through a dozen of them trying to get information. Subtle artists might be able to do something, come to think of it."

(He lets the songs wear off.)

The alien goes back to being despairing and suicidal.

"This seems like it might be a Taliar kind of problem," says Raika-seren. He definitely feels like if Maitimo delegated this to him he could get it solved with a minimum of mind control and psychological torture. Quite possibly not none, because holy fuck, these aliens, but a minimum.

"What are you thinking you'd do?"

"Not sure. I could try finding an alien planet and attempting diplomacy - possibly send Elaneth-imire for that because he'll be less inconvenienced if they shoot at him - I could have Nezhefena bring me another alien from the fleet and see if I can get anywhere with them if I don't use lots of mind control..."

"Finding a planet sounds like a recipe for a disaster if you don't have a way of handling them."

"Sure, but I get the impression that if finding them and talking to them would be a disaster, leaving them to gradually become increasingly panicked about the disappearance of their attack fleet is approximately the same disaster only slower. And we don't know how fast they're going to panic about the disappearance of their attack fleet."

"Seems like going to talk might be substantially worse. If the attack fleet's lost they worry that we'll come find them; if we do come find them, that's probably much worse than worrying. Agree that we need to act quickly, I just think seeking out a planet of them is really dangerous if you don't want them all dead."

"Could isolate the planet, at least, find a similar star in a different dimension and teleport it there, which would definitely promote disappearance-related panic elsewhere and definitely freak them right out about how powerful we are, but I don't think we're getting away without freaking them out about how powerful we are and at least it'd limit the spread of information. I want to know how many planets are in this interstellar clusterfuck and I want their locations and capabilities. I'm thinking we should grab another alien from the fleet and try interrogating it in a way that doesn't make it obvious we can read their minds. Not sure whether or not to put this one out of its misery first, but I'd definitely at least put it somewhere else."

They could get a lot of this information if they had a demon - Elaneth-imire's conjuration power is way less informative - but letting the peal anywhere near this situation seems really likely to cause way more problems than it solves.

"Yes, that crossed my mind too," he says to Elaneth-imire. "Eventually I was going to convince some demons to immigrate but the situation's too fraught to do that now." And to the alien - "do you want to die?"

yes of course they do this is horrible the world is ending and they are helpless to stop it

"So I'm happy to kill you but I want to make sure you're making the decision with accurate information. The world's not ending. We're going to take your whole species and put them somewhere where they never have to interact with any filth, probably. Can you confirm that you are aware that almost no one is going to die who doesn't prefer to, that no one is going to have to share a universe with species which they can't stand, and that you still prefer to die?"

There are entire other universes out there full of filth, lots of them it sounds like, and the filth are practically all-powerful, nothing is ever going to be okay again.

"You object to other species existing even if you don't have to interact with them? Wow."

They're filth!! Why is this insane filth creature having so much trouble grasping this simple concept?! Filth creatures are wrong, filth creatures are an abomination, they must be destroyed as quickly as possible! No one is safe as long as filth still exists! What if the filth followed them into this other universe and attacked, what then - and even if they didn't, they'd still be out there, being filth - and this filth has mind control, nothing it says can be trusted anyway - it is definitely the end of the world.

"In order to die you have to confirm that, if it were the case that we were going to leave you alone in an empty dimension and not attack you, you would still prefer to die. You don't have to trust me, just say that if, hypothetically, you trusted me, you'd want to die."