:All right. Thank you. I guess let us know when you're done error checking, then? Or when your local Leareth is done making up a summary: 

Okay. - why Ninquë? Where's Rúmil?

:Er, I have no idea who that is, one moment: Pause for ten seconds. :I'm told he moved south and stopped having any involvement in politics when Melkor was paroled: 

Oh. That makes sense.

(Vanyel is curious about the context there but doesn't ask.) 

:Do you have any other news?: 

Your Leareth's slightly livelier.

:Oh. That's good: 

Yeah, at this rate he'll be walking around way faster than a Quendi would.

:I hope so! All right, I don't think I have anything else right now, but maybe you can contact us in a week or when you have an update on the error checking or the magic summary, whichever comes first?: 

Sure.

:Good luck with, um, with everything: 

Thank you.

She visits Leareth again the next day.

Leareth is reading a book in an unfamiliar language, but sets it down when he hears her footsteps. Waits. 

(It turns out that reading is hard right now, he's very tired and concentrating on it for longer than a minute makes his head hurt, so he's mostly been reading for thirty seconds at a time and then waiting for the boredom to outweigh the tiredness again.) 

:I am finishing something, but can be there soon if you think my presence is helpful: the local Leareth informs her from a distance. 

I'm not sure, I'll try without and see what happens. She lets herself into Angband Leareth's room.

Huh, she did come back. Leareth watches her, trying to retrieve what they were actually talking about, before... Oh, right, she made him taste colours, and then left. 

"Are you reading my mind again." 

"No. I'll wait for your permission every time. Should I start?"

Leareth, at some point earlier when he was failing at sleeping, managed to slowly and arduously reason his way to the conclusion that either this is real, in which case they're actually trying to help him, or it's a hallucination, in which case his consent or lack thereof isn't actually going to make a difference in the long run. And to the extent that he's allowing himself to have a few preferences, now, he prefers the option that gives him more information, sooner.

"You can start." 

She nods and reads.

Leareth is scared. He's not sure why, and is trying to figure it out. 

...He's scared that any minute now he'll catch the slip-up that confirms he's still in Angband - well, not that he can trust his reasoning to produce true beliefs from observations, but in the hypothetical where he could do that. If that happens then it means Melkor has access to compulsions, somehow, and that only seems possible if he's won the war, and that would be an awful conclusion to come to, in the imaginary world where he can form conclusions at all. 

He's scared that he won't notice that - that the situation will keep being confusing and ambiguous, but with some observations that would be evidence of him not being in Angband, if evidence were still a thing. And...then what? There's a blank wall of refusal that he can't see past.

He's scared that he's giving Melkor a lot of valuable information, by inexplicably not being able or willing to stomp on all his thoughts until they stop. 

He's scared that she's going to hurt him.

"You might be scared of becoming confident you're not in Angband because then, if you were wrong, you might take actions that could help Melkor," suggests Bella.

Leareth instantly, involuntarily, runs the mental check on whether he's taking actions right now that could be helping Melkor if he were completely wrong about the context - he's pretty sure he isn't, he can't do magic. He has to remind himself that he can't trust his thoughts here either, but he suspects he's at least a dozen steps away from doing something genuinely helpful for Melkor. 

So as long as he stays right here, it's almost certainly still safe, he's not currently very exploitable. 

The problem is that there are steps that lead from here to eventually doing magic, maybe, he at least can't be certain there aren't, and–

- a shattered tower - stars obscured by blood and jagged rubble - 

–and he can't, he can'tcan'tcan't do things, he is nothing and no one and it isn't safe to care, it isn't safe to try, because he's in the hands of a power that will twist that to its own purposes and there is no longer any way out...

"Do you want me to calm you down -"

It takes Leareth a while to even process the question, but - being too panicked to finish thoughts doesn't seem that helpful in either scenario, so sure, he wouldn't mind being calmer. 

She pushes calm and waits.