Melody does not wince, because she has a number of years of practice not showing her personal emotional reactions to things, but - ouch. Also fair. Also, ouch. 

"A difficulty of using this plan would be that - one assumes the spell needs the power all at once. Do you have reason to believe Sauron has solved the problem of storing mage-energy such that he could, in fact, destroy cities in this way over a period of lead time and have the energy ready for the final spell? Or any reason to think that the spell does not need to be cast all at once and can instead be done incrementally?" 

"I don't think I have reasons for believing things," he says distractedly.

Telumë shoots Melody a look, which is questioning but also very slightly frustrated. 

:He is trying very hard to - figure out how to break his ability to make useful predictions: she sends, her mindvoice carefully neutral. :I can nudge him to pay more attention: 

Maitimo will notice the edges of the room becoming slightly soft, and then Telumë being very salient and grabbing his attention as he carefully repeats the question. 

Telumë is so pretty. He is distracted from trying to go flag all his memories as nonsense in some way that will hopefully be persistent. "Yes," he says, when Telumë has repeated the question. Though of course really he shouldn't, having reasons to think things is something that people do when their beliefs are going to correspond to reality in a fashion that his are not going to ever again. 

:That's better but I–: Melody pauses, thinking, her face giving nothing away. :I wasn't worried because I thought whatever he's doing here wouldn't stick, but - I'm getting concerned it might. You found something that did, before, and he knows that. It might be smart to wrap up and have him sleep and try again later: 

Telumë shakes his head slightly. He's so close to getting a very key piece of information and this one is time-sensitive and - well, at some point it's going to matter less if Maitimo breaks his own mind. It'll help them, even, if he's less - goal-oriented - about pursuing Sauron's aims at a remove. 

(They can help him put himself back together later, when the oath is dealt with. Right? That has to be true.) 

"Tell me what about your model of Sauron's plans indicates that he has this capability," he says, and despite his effort to control it, his voice holds a flicker of impatience and frustration. He's been practicing not leaking that way but this body is very new and most of his time in it was spent alone in the wilderness. 

- scaredscared -

- he wonders what Telumë will do if his truth spells and Melody's tampering isn't enough. He's not sure - and that's useful, right, lean into that, he's not sure because he can't actually make predictions, not under these conditions, can't trust his memories, can't understand people - can't understand Telumë - 

- and pushing back against that there's another much more familiar and comfortable line of reasoning. This is important and Telumë doesn't have lines he won't cross to accomplish important things. If he thinks it's a good idea to hurt Maitimo he will. Melody - won't object, though it'll bother her. It might divide Telumë and the Quendi, if they find out - they're all in the same place Maitimo once was, abstractly on board with Telumë's worldview while disastrously ignorant of what it looks like in the world Telumë is from, to be willing to hurt people. Findekáno probably has not been told about this, and wouldn't cooperate with it, and there are all kinds of interesting fault lines there - and this feels like a useful direction to push in, actually -

- it is very nearly physically painful to go back and tag all those thoughts, so compelling and straightforward, with "maybe" and "who knows really" -

"Discussions weren't constrained," he says, "I think if I'm remembering right and I might not be." Because he's trying not to. "In a way that they would be if he didn't think he could - well, I don't know that. It kind of seemed that way at the time."

:We need to be done here right now: And Melody reaches in and taps Maitimo's shoulder and suddenly he is no longer conscious. She catches him as he slips sideways. "Give me a hand getting him back to bed," she says out loud. 

Telumë does. Listens as she tries to convey what she was Seeing. It's hard because Mindhealing Sight is difficult to describe and she can't get a link 'wide' enough to convey it directly to him, given his utter lack of Thoughtsensing. 

(Maitimo had a way around this, before - osanwë isn't constrained like that, it does even better at sharing sense-impressions than deep rapport between two Mindspeakers... Telumë nudges that line of reasoning away.) 

"Can you put back what he did?" he asks. 

"I think so, mostly. I won't get it totally perfect – helps that I was watching as he did it but my control isn't that fine, ultimately." If she's bothered by what they're doing, it doesn't show in her voice or manner. She probably is bothered, though, knowing her.

"And I'll do some redirects toward - paying attention to you if he starts poking at other lines of reasoning. I could maybe do redirects away from deliberately trying to break his own mind, but - he'll notice that, right, it'll just be more evidence his mind is broken. Because he's not actually wrong about that." 

Telumë sits with his unconscious currently-evil boyfriend's head in his lap. Blinks away tears. "Use your judgement, then, please." 

A world away, Vanyel sits all of them down. Casts a privacy-barrier. Doesn't quite touch Stef but they're sitting close to each other. :Jisa contacted me. We have some important facts that came out of questioning Maitimo: 

That's good. Anything that changes plans here -

:Probably. I don't know how, yet, but–: he grits his teeth, :but we're pretty sure Sauron has a plan to get Melkor back from the Void: 

Well, fuck. Soon?

:We're not sure. Soon by Quendi standards, though. He needs - half a million lives, for blood-power. At least that was the guess. We have limited information because Sauron never discussed it directly with Maitimo, presumably because they were mostly operating out of temples to Vkandis, who would be extremely not on board with this plan. Maitimo re-derived it from various cues and context, and from...understanding Sauron's goals, I guess. He has a very good understanding due to being oathed to share them, but of course he's also not exactly cooperating, so everything we know has wide uncertainty. I believe it, though, and I buy the power requirement. We think Sauron has a solution for storage of mage-energies, in which case it wouldn't have to be all at once. However. He could get it all at once just from the population of Valdemar, and he has shared control of two other higher-population countries and considerable access to Iftel. We have to assume that he could meet those power requirements tomorrow, if he were willing to burn the alliance with Vkandis: 

So how do we stop him. A war is just going to - involve lots of people dying, maybe in a way he can use -

:I know. For now Leareth - sorry, Telumë - has been trying to set up protections around the cities Sauron is most likely to destroy in order to get power, if we didn't oblige him with a war. And considering ways of making sure that if there is a war, Sauron can't get the mage-power from any deaths unless he's right there in person, and he can't be everywhere. That ought to be feasible if Telumë has mages onsite, for now Telumë is pretty sure that he and his researchers are still ahead of Sauron on understanding Velgarth magic, but that probably won't last: Sigh. :Telumë is also considering avenues to disrupt the alliance with Vkandis, but that could push Sauron to move even faster: 

We could build Leareth's god.

Vanyel goes very still. 

:...He was considering that: he sends finally. :He - doesn't have it as a first option because, well, his planned power source was the country Sauron currently controls, and also he needs an order of magnitude more power in the first place. He thinks there might be ways of decreasing that, but - most of them would be awful too, like using a Maia as the initial container, which would involve killing the Maia and he was not expecting to get a volunteer. Also he's not fully confident in his maths: Pause. :Your people have been checking. How confident are they?: 

I don't think they've turned anything up yet that they think is wrong but really we should put them and Leareth's research team in the same place so they can talk to each other directly, it's not the sort of project that works if you're just occasionally passing notes. Quendi count for more power than humans, and we come back - at least if someone fetches Mandos -

:I can fetch Mandos whenever it seems like a good idea, assuming he's parked in the same spot as before - it's still nice and far away from any of Vkandis and Sauron's operations: Vanyel closes his eyes. :It'd be a really big gamble, but - worth asking, right, how fast Leareth and his people can do this if they're pulling out all the stops. I wonder if there's a way for the Silmarils to help, too - they'd have to be in Velgarth, not Arda, but Leareth's organization is very solidly in control of the north. And...: soft frown, :and I think we have a Velgarth god on our side, too. The Valdemaran god isn't gone. I think They're - lying in wait. Telumë suspected They might see a path of twisting Vkandis and Sauron's current plans toward something that advances Their goal instead, at the last minute. But of course we won't know more without talking to Them directly and, um, nobody will agree to let me have a near-death experience so I can do that: 

And you're the only person who can talk to them?