Vanyel seems quietly pleased. (This is definitely a point in favour of the other world actually containing Leareth, his style is recognizable. He's going to have to check all of it, obviously, but it's magic he understands in general, he can do that.) 

He thanks her warmly when she's done (even the cut-down summary takes half an hour or so to relay). :No news yet on your side?: 

The gods have yet to try again to assassinate me, error checking is not quite as slow as writing the spell from scratch but it really pokes along, yeah, that's all that's going on here.

:All right. It's going to take a while to go through this material, so - maybe we can check back in a week, unless you get something important sooner?: 

Sure.

Angband Leareth continues to be bored, and to play around with completely hypothetical and non-decision-relevant thoughts, and read when he's tired of that, and spend a lot of time failing to sleep. (He is so shockingly bad at sleeping right now, he isn't tracking time very well but it feels like he jolts awake every hour or two). Possibly this is contributing to the background fogginess and the fact that, no matter how painfully bored he is, he can't concentrate for long at all before his head hurts. 

He is still annoyed at nothing making sense but he's starting to sort through the pieces of it now.

...The biggest piece is that the story they told him is both weird and convenient, that this girl from two worlds away accidentally landed in exactly that spot. Then again, he accidentally wound up in exactly the right spot to head off a civil war among the Noldor, and if he's mistrusting his memories that far back now, then there's no point in anything. Maybe the multiverse is just like that for some reason. He could try to develop theories if his brain were less gluey. Presumably the other Leareth, if he's real, has been doing so. 

The second biggest piece is the stupid compulsions, which he's increasingly fed up with. He doesn't want to do magic anyway but he does sometimes want to, say, finish reading a sentence that made him think about some magic technique, or get up to grab water for himself and notice along the way some affordance to cast something, and the compulsions are thorough and paranoid enough to sometimes catch that and make him freeze and need to unstick himself. 

Anyway, leaving aside the fact that he undeniably is developing a preference for Not That even if having preferences is unsafe and bad, it doesn't make sense for Melkor to have access to that and use it for this. Even if he's won the war and is playing around, this stupid scenario where the compulsions feel like his own work doesn't make sense.

He turns the hypothetical from side to side and looks at it from various angles, in snatches in between being frustrated about failing to sleep again or inexplicably panicking or finding himself unable to do anything at all for half a day. 

Nine days later, after an uneventful check-in with Vanyel where he thanks her again for the summary and has some questions to pass back to Leareth, the local Leareth asks her to contact him (via poking the local Vanyel.) 

Yes?

:He wants to talk to you again. I am not sure about what but he seems to perhaps have a plan:

Huh, okay. I'll be by.

She is by.

Angband Leareth sits up when he sees her. He seems sort of surprised that she’s there, despite having asked.

"I heard you wanted to see me?"

Leareth looks at her for a bit, seems to be about to speak a few times. Finally gives up. “Can you just read my thoughts again.”

(Assuming she isn’t already doing it anyway because he’s in Angband, but Leareth’s priors are actually almost tipping away from that, now, shocking as that is.)

"Okay." Read.

He's scared, again, he's dived past the edge of what feels safe, asking to talk to her is way too close to deliberately trying to affect the world even if it, in itself, probably isn't an exploitable action. 

If he were capable of drawing conclusions from evidence, hypothetically, then - he would at this point be placing less than even odds that he's still in Angband. The situation doesn't make much sense either way but it makes less sense in the version where it's Melkor. 

Of course, that's something a hypothetical person who could trust any of their reasoning would want to be a lot more sure of before putting any weight on it. (He's letting it guide his anticipations toward 'probably not torture' for now, because it's not like that prediction is doing a lot, it's not really making him less stressed even.) 

If he were more sure, a lot more, if any one thing seemed genuinely conclusive, then - he isn't sure what, actually, all of this is still off in hypothetical-space, but...something, on the other side of a wall his mind won't let him cross. 

Would you like me to guess things that might happen if you were more sure?

Sure, she can do that. 

You might want to make requests about your treatment, like the compulsions. You might want to go back to working on the war in some capacity; or you might find yourself in a position where you have to deal with not wanting to even though you technically could, and maybe having to explain that or ask someone to do it for you.

...He actually hadn't considered whether he would want to go back to helping with the war effort. Probably not? Wanting to do things seems impossible right now, and he shouldn't do things, that's still true in both possible worlds, even if he's not in Angband then Melkor has still been all over his mind and really no one should let him do things. (He's assuming that the other Leareth, if he's real, would take care of this, because he's not stupid.) 

Also, the second part of his recent thinking has been that he maybe wants to make some requests anyway, on the grounds that he's carefully looked at them and they don't seem likely to lead to actions that help Melkor, not without a lot more steps that he has no intention of taking until something changes. The compulsions are kind of tiresome, obviously he shouldn't have access to his Gifts (FEAR, which he tries to shove away), but if they have a different way of blocking them - his Nayoki has some research, maybe the earlier Nayoki doesn't yet though... It's fine either way, he's wrestled himself back to lacking a strong preference, but it's been on his mind. 

The constant sleep deprivation is more annoying. He doesn't know if Bella can do things about that in general, but if she could help him sleep again after this, that still seems harmless and he would appreciate it. 

I can put you to sleep without having to teleport up if you'd like me to do that every evening, though you'll have to go to bed before I do for that to work. I can also contact the other Nayoki if you'd like.

Sure.

He's also still poking at avenues for getting more information, one way or another, so far he's mostly just come up with 'ask the other Leareth to let him read his thoughts in return' because that seems very hard to fake, but also it would require letting him use Thoughtsensing, and probably the other Leareth knows a lot of strategically sensitive material and won't want to let him. 

He keeps finding that he wants to talk to Vanyel. He isn't sure why, it's maybe partly that Melkor isn't that good at Vanyel in any context other than 'very sad' which...isn't hard...but it's mostly not that. 

There's not a straightforward way to let you talk to your Vanyel - well, I guess if I told him to expect you and I loaned you the earcuff he could Mindspeak and Thoughtsense even if you couldn't actively do anything? I guess I could invite mine here but he's significantly earlier. I could bounce you local Leareth's thoughts if he wanted, though, same as I was doing before but the other way around.

What year is it? 

Autumn 792.

That's a lot earlier. He wouldn't mind talking to the local Vanyel but it's very possible local Vanyel doesn't want to talk to him, they hadn't gotten very far toward being on good terms at that point.

He's very skeptical about an artifact that can let Vanyel use Gifts at him from another world when Leareth is the one who has it, and also probably no one should be lending him their magic artifacts, why would they do that. 

If other Leareth is fine with that plan then he would appreciate Bella bouncing his thoughts. (He's not expecting the other Leareth to be fine with the plan at all.) 

The thing the artifact does is shrink range for telepathic abilities to nothing, both ways. If the earcuff has use left, and I'm out of arts, I can still talk to Quendi; I just have to go 'near' them and unshield things for them to pick up with osanwë and let them send things they want to send.

I'll ask him.

She does.