"West of where? I can't imagine you have much idea where you are right now. Anyway, I was in Rethwellan before." 

"We have to be in the mountains, Leareth's hardly going to leave them." He sits up, reaches for his hair. Hesitates. Draws some conclusions about the world from the state of his hair. Declines to fix it, because it'd probably take considerable inconvenience for them to fake it - they're not going to have Quendi here cooperating with this - and so it's his most useful source of information. 

"What food do you have?"

She pulls the curtains all the way open and points him to a table that has a decent array of options, bread and cheese and fruit and pastries, all of it picked to be perfectly edible after sitting out for several hours. 

He will sit down and spread some cheese on some bread and break apart a pastry and take some grapes. (He does not actually eat any of them). 

"Are we done with the part where you need things from me or is Leareth just busy."

Melody sits as well. "Leareth is just busy. I expect he's going to keep thinking of questions to ask you for a while. Can you please actually eat that food or do I need to set-command you to do it." 

"I'm not sure." He continues not eating the food, though. "How long has it been?"

"Thirty-six hours since you arrived here. We had you for around a week before that but you weren't conscious at the time." Sigh. :Eat some food: 

He eats the food. 

Melody picks out the set-command as soon as he's eaten a reasonable amount. Has to separately make him drink water. At this point he is clearly not going to be cooperative with either and probably they should do a more permanent compulsion to eat and drink regularly. 

When Telumë arrives, his expression is cold and unreadable and he has Dara with him. "I am here to ask you some questions." 

- he reaches for a strand of loose hair, twirls it around his finger, chews on the end of the finger. "Is that so."

He is being very annoying and this is fair and reasonable of him, really. Telumë gestures to Dara, who silently casts the Truth Spell.

"What are your predictions for the top three most likely responses Sauron will have to your disappearance," he says smoothly. 

"He will throw a fit. He will blame the priesthood of Iftel even though as far as I know no procedural failures were involved. He will mope."

Huh. "...How often does Sauron throw fits - how often would he without you around to smooth it over, rather? What are the usual actions he would take and their likely results?" 

"In the five years he won over Vkandis I do not know of any conduct that led Vkandis to question his confidence in him. I think he can sustain that for longer if he needs to. He will probably torture some people to death in a Vkandis-approved fashion. I wouldn't've stopped him but I'd have picked them carefully and he will be careless picking them."

"Thinking about it now, what actions do you predict he is likely to take to accelerate the plan of retrieving Melkor from the Void?" 

So he knows that. 

"That's hard to predict," he says which is true but also he's not trying. He's not sure Leareth can actually get useful new mental work out of him with just this spell. "We never discussed the plan because we were in temples of Vkandis."

“Is he more likely to move faster or slower?”

Teeth gritted. "Haven't thought about it."

“Think about it for one minute now and tell me the answer.” Will a compulsion work, here? Maitimo is inconveniently good at sensing and working around compulsions, though. Probably even better now. 

(Currently this does not feel sexy at all.)

Fine. He will do both of those things. Pick an answer - he picks "slower", at what-feels-from-the-inside-like-random, spend a minute thinking of arguments. 

"He wanted to be ready to use the war as cover. Now the war is probably going to play out differently, in a fashion harder to use for that, because you know that's one of his aims from it. So being ready to go when the war starts is no longer as important, and he can't afford to split with Vkandis before you're dealt with. And probably we lost some researchers."

“If you find out that instead he moved faster, what would the reasons for that be? Spend a minute thinking and tell me.”

He needs to be worse at thinking. Leareth figured out how to be worse at thinking, when he needed to, in a way that survived losing his memories over and over - but Maitimo doesn't have a core that he understands how to destroy - what is there even at the center of him, how would you break it - 

"Scared of you, thinks you're gaining capabilities faster than him. Doesn't expect the alliance to hold up as long anyway. Can blow up some cities in Rethwellen for power for the spell, claim it's the same thing happening again -"

"Tell me the populations of the relevant cities and how many he would have to destroy - and which cities you think would be strategically correct to attack first or that you think he would attack first, strategically correct or not." 

"According to the most recent census there are one hundred twenty thousand people in Petras but it was a badly conducted census and I think includes some outlying areas you wouldn't hit and it's a stupid target, we just put all this work into getting them on our side. You'd have to take out a lot of smaller cities -" he lists some -

The core of a Maitimo is that people make sense, that they are never baffling or frustrating or alien, that it's always always worth the gentle little leap to understand them - what would it even mean, to not believe that anymore - you could believe, maybe, that the only person he'll ever interact with again is Leareth and he's been fed bad enough input about everyone else in the universe that he doesn't even have guesses about them, he has garbage he's been treating as guesses because he's accustomed to when he could trust his thoughts - these are not conditions under which you can know things, these are conditions under which that gentle little leap to understanding is a shove from hostile mindcontrol -