Leareth is lying in a stone room, and nothing in particular is happening right now, and he is mostly succeeding at not having any thoughts. It's a fine moment. He is not, literally this second, being tortured. This is not useful at all for predicting what the next moment is going to be like, of course, or for whether 'quiet stone room' has any particular resemblance to reality, but Leareth has gotten pretty good at not being curious.
A human and a Companion appear in the room.
The human looks around for three-quarters of a second, catches her breath, and then taps the prisoner for all the mana he's got and pulls all three of them into a bit of random forest she saw Tadri riding through one time.
She knocks Leareth unconscious.
"Fuck," she says to the Companion, "fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck -"
"Well first of all my spell apparently sometimes doesn't work correctly, since we're supposed to have landed in southern Valinor, I'm going to need to look it over to see if I hit a one in a thousand random failure chance or if I actually fucked it up in some way - it got us back here all right, thank goodness. Second of all uh I think that was Utumno. It looked Utumno-y. It's not the kind of thing you want to take very long to figure out so I didn't make a really detailed assessment, it was supposed to have been shut down an Age ago. I don't know how Leareth got there or when he got there or anything but sometimes people came out of Utumno kind of murdery so I have rendered him unconscious at least until I have mana again and possibly longer, we're going to need to sleep shifts so you can wake me up if he twitches and I can put him back down till I know what to do with him. I'm going to talk to Leareth's people and ask how long he's been missing, and tell Fëanáro and Rúmil what's keeping us..." She does the latter first, then reaches for Nayoki with the earcuff in the mode that doesn't drain her own mana. Nayoki? What happened to Leareth?
:My transit spell didn't drop me where I was trying to go - this could have been a random accident or a flaw in the spell, but it worked to get me back into Velgarth afterwards so the former's more likely, I just ought to check before I try again. I landed in a place that was or bore a striking resemblance to Utumno, the fortress wherein Melkor used to torture people, and didn't exactly want to stick around and double check and see if Melkor was home or what, so I just grabbed him and brought him here and knocked him out because sometimes people who go through Utumno murder a bunch of people once they're out and since he's a mage he could explode. Unless he is instead some sort of impostor. I don't have a clue what's going on here.
"If you are not worried about needing the mana more later, that seems good. He looks terrible."
Nayoki squats down on the forest floor beside Leareth, who up close is quite noticeably not her Leareth. "He is older," she says, baffled. "I might say by fifteen years, or more even."
And she rests her hand on his forehead and closes her eyes.
...And then makes an undignified squawking noise.
Nod.
"I am not sure what we do now," Nayoki admits. "It seems unwise to bring him anywhere in the north where important people are, for the same reason you brought him here. I am working on a research project for reversibly blocking Gifts, on the side of my main projects, but I do not have anything now."
"I think mage-gift is most of what makes him more dangerous than other people? Maybe Mindspeech as well." She hesitates. "Might I watch you do it? It might show me an easier way to achieve similar things with Mindhealing. Oh, and also I am a mage so I can do compulsions. Which would be faster but - less neat, I think."
"...Oh, if it takes all day that is different, I had not realized it was so long. In order to be sure I have compulsions that fully block magic use, it will also be very obtrusive and block many other actions. I think I could do it precisely enough to still let him talk to us." Nayoki lifts her hands, lets them fall. "He could definitely do it."
"I don't know what was going on. What it looks like, based on my quick glance around where I found him and a look at his mind, is that he was in Utumno or something like Utumno - an active version, it's been shut down too long for a human to be still alive there unsupervised. I don't know whether that means that Melkor's Maiar are running it without him, or that it's a comparable torture fortress unrelated to Melkor personally at all, or that he's your future self time traveled to the past and then to now for some reason, or what, but the basics of what to expect from Utumno victims are that everything scares them, especially things that look like they're going to be 'plotty', and they don't want to do anything, often including have complex thoughts, and that the standard initial treatment is to leave them somewhere pretty - uh, my previous experience is with Elves so that's not optional normally but I wouldn't expect it to hurt in this case - and have only excruciatingly boring interactions such as singing them innocuous songs if you must engage them in conversation at all, and to expect them to be moody and uncommunicative and not to be surprised if they up and commit suicide one day. I don't know how different he'll be on account of being you, or human, or what. I can take care of nightmares and panic attacks and trauma associations and that's not everything but it might help a lot - conveniently I don't need him to actually cooperate, just to acknowledge that, like, if this were real and not the introductory stage of a torture simulation, it would be fine for me to do that."
Leareth's expression stays perfectly level. He doesn't say anything immediately.
"It would seem very uncharacteristic for a me to commit suicide, but at this point I am not ruling out anything as impossible," he says finally. "I would like to check that his immortality setup is working before we wake him up."
"I am quite sure he cannot; I was thorough. Unfortunately, I expect being that thorough to incidentally block a number of other actions, including for example deciding to leave this room, though if we expect he will not want to do anything then that might be less obtrusive?"
"If someone were to do that to me, I would certainly be alarmed about it, and I have not even been tortured by a torture-god." He shakes his head. "I am still appalled that other worlds have gods that are so much worse than ours here. Anyway. I will need a couple of minutes to check this."
And he goes into trance, with a familiar motion lets his mind slip half out of the material plane, and searches for the cord of magic that should tie his other self to his immortality sanctuary in the Void.
A few minutes later he surfaces, blinking. "Everything is in working order. Also, I may have just learned something interesting about interplanar mechanics. Anyway, I think we can proceed now?"
Leareth doesn't move, but he does briefly open his eyes.
The first thing he notices, without meaning to parse the information but his mind can't help it, is that he's somewhere else. Somewhere he recognizes, in fact. (Which means Melkor could simulate it too.) He also remembers a very brief snippet of - a young human girl, with a Companion, and then suddenly being in forest, and then nothing. (Which is...pretty uncreative and low-effort, really, as fake rescues go.)
He chooses not to do anything with those observations.
The second thing he notices, with a jolt of panic that takes a while to subside even though it's very pointless, is that he can feel his Gifts again, but also there are some skillfully done compulsions on him. It's quite a recognizable feeling. In fact, if reasoning from evidence were a permissible mental move, which it isn't, he would conclude that this was his own work. He thinks they block him from using magic, and probably other things, but none of them are things he's at all inclined to try anyway, so he's going to keep being unsure and not caring either way.
(Leareth would be curious about how Melkor pulled this off, but he is successfully out of the habit of being curious about anything, curiosity isn't safe.)
He continues to not be tortured and this continues not to be a useful predictor of anything at all; it's sort of nice, though he's trying not to have any preferences about it.
"Hello," says the girl. She is dressed and has her hair done up not like a Herald but like a Quendi - if not a Quendi who is very creative with their braiding situation - but is obviously human. "I don't expect you to believe any statements I make about what's going on, but are you willing to entertain a hypothetical about what you'd want if some things were the case?"
Leareth tries not to hear the question and fails. All of that would be baffling if he cared, which he's trying not to. And kind of failing at, because this is different and things are happening and a large chunk of his mind has decided that 'be terrified' is the appropriate response to this. He can at least try not to have any preferences about whether or not he's terrified.
He does not answer the question or respond in any way.
"Yeah, that was a long shot." She looks at Not Tortured Leareth. "I'm willing to consider you a source of advance directive if we have to. I don't know how long you want to wait, it might be letting him lie there for a long time helps and Elf timelines aren't going to be very predictive so it might not be years, but..."
Nod. "I think I am inclined to wait. I did not know it was possible for a version of me to - be like this. We could give it a week and see if he is better or worse or the same?" Pause. "Is he going to eat if we leave him alone? He does not seem inclined to take actions at all."
"He might not eat, though, again, I've only seen ones who got as far as Valinor and those do so I don't have much useful experience there. I can hit him with the healing spell every day and he probably won't starve to death, though that's inconvenient and the spell isn't meant for that and perhaps you have a better idea."
(That isn't how Healing OR spells work at all even noticing that is too close to curiosity and he is, instead, going to do not that - although Melkor really ought to have dragged enough context on Velgarth's magic out of his head to get it right - he's going to stop trying to make inferences about things now–)
"Yeah. I could try to develop something specific for it and might have it inside a week but I also really want to check over my interplanar transit to find out what went wrong - I think my friend's anxious that having spent a fraction of a second in Utumno is going to make me wonder forever if I'm still there, the mistarget could have gone way worse."
Nod. "We could try your current Healing spell, and have someone assessing him with Healing-Sight to see if he appears to be deteriorating over time, and direct research efforts accordingly."
Or give up and use a minimally invasive compulsion for it until you figure something out: he adds in Mindspeech, :I do not wish to alarm him more by saying so now:
Sigh. "Actually, I think I would not endorse risking physical damage to myself in order to avoid an experience I dispreferred, and...probably that means he would feel the same way, in principle. So - hmm, I think I can do a conditional one that will only have effect when we bring him food, that way I will not have to come back and repeatedly do it..."
He gets to work, doing the simplest, action-compelling variant; imagining himself in this situation, he thinks he would prefer it at least be obvious what was happening, and not instead have it be trying to fool him about what he wants....
- scaredscaredscaredscaredscared - this reaction doesn't make a lot of sense, being (fake?)-compulsioned into eating isn't an action or a decision any more than not that, and he doesn't have preferences about things that are just different states of the world. Nonetheless his brain is generating a lot of panic about this, which he doesn't make much effort to hide because what's the point.
Leareth isn't trying to calm down deliberately, doing anything on purpose isn't safe, but if the situation stops changing then over five or ten minutes he'll gradually go back to his background state, which is moderately stressed but also pretty detached from it and not having very many thoughts.
Nod. "Then I suppose we can do the waiting for a week?" He glances at Tadri. "I would like you and the others to trade off keeping an eye on him, bring him food at the usual mealtimes, and otherwise be very boring. I will probably not come back until the week has passed, since I assume my being here would indicate things happening and thus be stressful."
"I believe we can do that. It would make the most sense to repurpose the basement, which has more open space, but we will either need to Gate her down there or replace the stairs with not-stairs. We can have that space ready in a couple of candlemarks, if that is all right?"
:Right. Hmm. I mean, even if Utumno is still active, we're pretty sure Melkor was actually defeated by the other Valar, right? If so, presumably it'd be just his Maiar running it, and maybe they're not powerful enough to suppress wizardry or don't know how. Do you know if the other, er, non-evil Maiar could?:
:It actually seems rather high priority to know what happened, and in particular how he - how I, I suppose - ended up a prisoner there against my will. I am not sure I wish to wait a week. However, I sort of doubt he will answer my questions about it. I could go read him with Thoughtsensing - I was doing that a little, already, I am endorsedly comfortable with past or future versions of me reading my own thoughts. I expect that in the present he would find it very stressful, though, so I am not sure what to do:
A pause. :I thought you might have advice, and possibly more context on Arda that could help me answer some of my great many questions:
:...If Melkor knows everything I know, that is in itself extremely worrying! He is currently shielded; I can cheat because it seems it still counts as 'my' shields, though it is definitely noticeable to him when I do so. He may not have been shielded before, since I would assume Melkor had a way of blocking his Gifts, or else he would not have remained a prisoner for very long:
Leareth absorbs that quietly for a while.
:That makes sense. Whatever the explanation, Arda sounds like a dangerous place to be currently, especially for a Velgarth mage and for me in particular. I will have to leave it to your friends to figure out what precautions to take there. However, it occurs to me that if Melkor or his Maiar can block the magic of Velgarth, they may be able to replicate it. In which case it is not impossible they would show up in pursuit. I do not know a way of tracking your teleport spell but that does not mean it is impossible:
:Noted. This reinforces my impression that I had better try to read the other me to learn as much as we can about the context here. Do you have any advice for making it less stressful? For example, I am having difficulty predicting whether it would be better to explain why I am doing it, or better not to say anything since that indicates things happening:
It might depend on what he was in the middle of when I got there, but it didn't look like there was much. If he'll be able to tell, you might want to, like, acknowledge that it's happening even if he's unlikely to appreciate a detailed explanation? If he can't tell maybe skip it.
:He will be able to tell because I need to go through his shields to do it. Also I will likely have to do some probing to get specific topics rather than the surface thoughts he happens to have. I will inform him I am doing it. If it causes him to panic enough that I cannot actually get the information, I might want you to calm him down then - if it is for clear strategic reasons, I think that is something any version of me would endorse on reflection:
:Thank you: And Leareth heads back over to the infirmary to, in a sense, read his own mind.
He gently taps the other Leareth's shields. :I am going to read you: And slips through the shields, which aren't exactly under his control the way his own are, but it's sort of like external room-shielding that he's personally keyed to; there's some resistance but it lets him past without having to actually break anything.
Leareth can tell someone is reading him, and it feels like - well, it's not like he has any previous experience having his read mind by himself but it sure does feel that way.
If drawing inferences from observations were safe, then he would be very confused, and scared, because of what it indicates about Melkor's capabilities that he can fake this, either he has Vanyel, in which case the war is lost, or he's figured out how to replicate Velgarth Gifts, in which case the war is still lost–
–and he manages not to follow that trail any further, reminding himself that his reasoning and the evidence of his senses are both compromised and he has no way of usefully interpreting what's happening.
The scared sticks around, though, escalating toward full panic when he senses a mental probe tugging his thoughts in a particular direction - toward Vanyel, right now, the other person is curious about that.
That enables Leareth to go back to skimming thoughts which are not mostly internal screaming. He tries to be efficient about it, because it turns out to actually be moderately distressing.
:...All right, I think I have the highlights, and we ought to talk about it. It is very strange:
Leareth feels the change; he's so confused, this doesn't feel like Projective Empathy or Mindhealing. (Honestly it works better while being less obtrusive than either.) Melkor is making some baffling artistic choices here, he thinks distantly, and then stops being curious about that and just curls up in a ball, he's kind of shaking but it's not like that's an action he decided on, so whatever.
"The year is 1490, or was at the last point Leareth was tracking the calendar, he does not have any idea how long he was imprisoned. The King's eldest son, Fëanáro - is that your friend? He sounded similar to the description. Anyway, he is grown up, married, has grown children, and has a very unfortunate relationship with some half-siblings; there was nearly a civil war over succession, between him and somebody called Nolofinwë. The other Leareth landed there by accident due to a Gate experiment, and intervened to prevent violence, but - it turned out Melkor was behind it. The other Valar had paroled him some time earlier. Leareth has some gaps in his memory before his capture, so I am unclear on the exact sequence of events, but they somehow ended up openly at war with Melkor on the other continent - Endorë, is that right? Melkor built a new torturefortress; this one is called Angband. Leareth was trying to grab Vanyel, who would have been in his early thirties at that point in his timeline, to help with the war effort. He seems to be under the impression that he probably succeeded, and that Vanyel was most likely not captured as well, but he is confused about most things, obviously missing major chunks of his memories, and seems very reluctant to draw any conclusions about what reality is."
"Thank you."
Leareth takes a slow breath and lets it out, resting his hands flat on the tabletop. "It makes sense that this other Melkor could not block your type of arcane magic, having never encountered it, and this has me slightly reassured that he could not have tracked your departure. I think it would be good on one level to contact that Arda, since it sounds as though they are in serious need of some help, but - also it does not sound like a very safe place for Velgarth mages, since Melkor can definitely cancel our magic entirely. I hope the Vanyel there is in fact all right." He closes his eyes. "The other me had become rather fond of him, in the intervening years."
Leareth realizes he didn't actually specify which of them, but he can do both.
Fëanáro ran away as a child, when his father remarried after his mother's death; the other Leareth doesn't remember his exact age, just that it was around the equivalent of a human ten-year-old. He invented writing as an adolescent. He married a woman called Nerdanel, whose family had some sort of relationship with Aulë, god of building things. He had a number of very talented children, the oldest of whom was called Nelyafinwë Maitimo and got on well with the other Leareth. He created some powerful magical artifacts called the Silmarils, which captured the light of the Trees.
He tested the other Leareth's authenticity as an alien from another world by immediately asking to learn eleven languages in a day.
Vanyel's day to day life was mostly unclear to Leareth until 798, when Queen Elspeth died, her grandson Randale took the throne, and the Karsites immediately started a war. Vanyel was the single biggest player in Valdemar's military and became an incredibly famous war hero, though the other Leareth thought he spent most of the years-long war very depressed. He eventually used blood-magic at the final battle to take Karse's capital city and give it back to the surviving princess of the royal family who had escaped a coup. Said princess was possessed by Vkandis and given miraculous healing after Valdemar's victory. (No gryphons showed up, though.) There was an enormous scandal over the blood-magic. Eventually, in 806, Vanyel and Leareth had established enough trust for the other Leareth to share his god-plan. Vanyel immediately blocked the Foresight dream, and (with one dream worth of explanation) went off on some sort of fact-finding research mission to learn more about Leareth's past lives.
"Maybe contacting Fëanáro should wait until my Fëanáro has an earcuff of his own - I'll have to scroll it out for him when I get a chance - and then they can catch each other up on things of relevance to Fëanáros and be fifty percent more focused when talking to everyone else."
We've never met. My name is Bella. I am not from but am currently in what seems to be a separate, earlier Velgarth, and used to live in a separate, earlier Arda. I'm calling to let you know that in a transport mishap earlier today I landed in the Angband of your world and teleported out with the Leareth therefrom; he's currently at my Leareth's place.
...to tell you that. I don't have up to date strategic information on how the war is going because your Leareth's been in Angband for a while so I don't know what to suggest from here, although I guess I can explain what I bring to the mix, or will once my interplanar transit spell is working again? Though it might be faster to wait for my Fëanáro to replicate my comms device and talk to his counterpart.
Right, I didn't want to stick around and debug it in - uh, I thought it was Utumno, but same difference - so I did it again and it got me where I was trying to go, but I want to find out if there's something that's making the spell have a high error rate, such that I could fix it.
Without the interplanar teleport, I can use an artifact I have to close telepathic distance. I have something like a Mindspeaking-Thoughtsensing-Mindhealing mashup power; I can use it from here on targets I know how to specify, which could be useful for relaying things over long distances - I don't think it would be safe to try offensive use against Ainur. It also works for Velgarth and Quendi telepathic abilities for anyone I loan it to. With the interplanar teleport, I can show up in person and use spells - I have a good healing spell, and an intraplanar teleport, and some random utility and minor combat stuff, and I can enchant a few kinds of artifacts.
:Interesting. I can, er, pass all of that on:
Pause. He has a number of questions, most of which aren't that strategically urgent, one of which he definitely has to ask even though his mind is very flinchy about it.
:How did you end up on, um, visiting-his-place terms with the Leareth you know over there?: is what comes out.
Oh, uh, I attracted a lot of attention after I'd been in Haven for a few weeks, I put people's missing limbs back and stuff? And he noticed that and was curious about me and eventually offered to help me if I needed it especially if a god had it in for me. Then Iftel burst open like a horrible pinata and sent a small army after me because the gods didn't like my face and I teleported him in and he helped with that.
:Gah? Ugh. Really?: Vanyel passes that on to Yfandes. :Er, good to know, thank you. I wasn't aware of that: He's still not sure any of her story is for real, but it's hitting bizarre level of specificity for some invented ruse.
:Did you know a version of me?: That might actually be helpful information, in terms of judging whether this is real, since Melkor won't know anything that Leareth doesn't, and that should include a lot of things about Vanyel's life.
:I don't think we do: Vanyel is trying to decide if he thinks there being another Leareth there is going to be helpful or the opposite of that. :We didn't really have a plan. I guess I'd had the thought that I know a Mindhealer back in Valdemar - huh, actually, wonder if you met her. Melody?:
:Nobody else who's very key to the war effort has died or been captured since what happened to Leareth - which was about five months ago, if that matters. We're holding our ground and we have options. Oh, and, um, Leareth did some magic for Melkor. A handful of Gates. Months ago, and then stopped and we haven't seen any more sign of it, we don't know why, but that's some indication he was, well, compromised by him:
:I think I already know that I cannot obtain an answer on whether he did additional magic. His memories of everything after he was captured are - rather sparse, actually, and everything is sort of jumbled in a very odd way. Nayoki thinks that a number of his memories have been removed, or covered up, she is not sure how:
:That would be very helpful. Nayoki was not sure if she could do it at all, much less in less than several years: A pause. :I do worry that it is - doing things to him, and I think I agree it would be better if we could just leave him alone and let everything be very boring for a while, but also there is potentially time-sensitive information in there:
On the one hand, this is not very unexpected, it's one of the established plot beats, even if it's the strange maybe-Herald who dresses like Quendi offering it instead of someone taking him to Lórien; it doesn't have the extra terror of being completely new and different. It's not worth being curious about and it doesn't matter one way or another, since it's not like he has any way of judging if the memories are real ones (on priors they aren't, but going off that is dangerously close to reasoning about it.)
On the other hand, it is an established plot beat and that means more things are going to happen. Maybe. It's not like he can especially predict the future from the present.
Leareth doesn't respond in any way. He's some amount more scared, but not to the extent of fully panicking about it.
...That is new and different - well, maybe, maybe not, he knows Melkor has been messing with his memories, that's why it isn't safe to take actions or have goals or reason about the world. But he doesn't remember anything like this, and it's not any kind of Velgarth magic.
He can float for a while, repeatedly not having preferences about what's going to happen, but he is gradually getting more panicky about the situation.
:Hmm. Your subtle arts might be alarming, since they are not something this version of me would know of, but in that case I would expect it to be more of a sudden spike when you started. Though, it is difficult to model myself under such different circumstances so I am not sure my predictions here are reliable:
He thinks for a moment. :I could come read him again but that is likely to make him more anxious. You have my permission to look at more things if it might help figure it out, since you are doing things anyway:
In which case she'll observe Leareth going through several cycles of noticing that something happening near him is surprising-or-confusing (in this case, her talking to him), on one level being alarmed about this, while on another level repeatedly stepping on any attempt to interpret said confusion, or care one way or another whether the surroundings are alarming. This is a fine moment, he's not being tortured right now, which doesn't offer any prediction about the next moment but making predictions isn't safe. Not safe to reason, not safe to have preferences or goals, definitely not safe to take actions but he's trying to cut it off as early in the stack as possible. There's quite a lot of cognitive effort going into that, actually.
Still, on an instinctive level Leareth can't help being scared that things are happening nearby, things which don't make sense, and probably at some point one of them is going to be bad.
There are a lot of them! They're not exactly out of order but they're very choppy, with sudden switches and transitions. Also most of them are really horrible.
He tries not to do anything or have thoughts.
Someone brings food and he is now very obviously compulsioned to eat it. He tries not to have any preferences about that either, or notice any confusion about how Melkor can imitate compulsions; he's not completely succeeding at the latter.
The other Leareth goes in after he's eaten and spent a while lying and staring at nothing.
:I am going to look at some of the memories: he sends, and starts doing so.
...gods why are so many of them torture, he really doesn't want to make the other Leareth dwell on those and he doesn't find them very appealing to look at himself either; they're not really information-containing.
It's less that he's scared, exactly, and more that everything is very loud and overwhelming and he keeps having his mind yanked around by the probably-fake-other-Leareth, for inexplicable mysterious reasons, and he's trying not to have any preferences about the situation but it's really hard not to want it to stop.
:He is not helping. I did not actually explain what I am looking for or why, though, it seems that explaining more things is mostly going to be bad. I can find a memory that both of us should have, sure:
He'll have to dig around for something salient enough that he would definitely recall it decades later; permanent Gate installation in the facility where he first recruited Nayoki, that'll do.
Leareth checks himself as well. :I see. Thank you:
:I am stopping now: he tells the other Leareth, and backs out of his mind. He gets up and leaves the room.
:Now maybe we can leave him alone and let things be very boring for a week?: he sends to Bella. :That was the most time sensitive piece:
:Thank you:
Leareth checks in with the Healers, makes sure someone is on duty to keep an eye on Angband Leareth from a distance, reminds them about making sure he eats and drinks at reasonable intervals (they don't really need reminding of this, they're Healers, but it's possible he's fussing because he can't think of anything actually useful to do.)
Bella scrolls her interplanar transit and stares at it till there's a copy in her Valinor for Rúmil and Fëanáro to look over. They all start poring over it for errors and places to add contingencies to make failures less catastrophic.
The next day she calls Vanyel and tells him they found only the memories of the four expected Gates and not any other magic performed since then.
I haven't gotten into that much detail in my reads but based on general knowledge - uh, Melkor runs prisoners through hallucinatory simulations, often with memories added or removed, so he had a lot of tries to set up a convincing argument. I'm not sure how he stopped; any realization he made could have been erased. I can try to figure it out but we were hoping to let him be bored and not disturbed for the rest of the week and see if that helps him at all; is it important?
Vanyel hesitates for a bit, thinking. :I don't think it's urgent. So do what you think is best for him, I guess, or go with the other Leareth's judgement on it. Anyway:
Another pause. :We, um... I'm sure you'd understand that your story is very weird and also pretty, er, convenient? And we'd like to believe it but we have to be suspicious. It's hard to know what to do to verify it that's not a risk for us, aside from the other Arda being able to talk to Fëanáro here, I guess. Is that going to take a while?:
He can make an earcuff like mine, but for that to happen I have to write down the whole spell, stare at it so he can copy it, and he has to translate it it into his own notation. This wouldn't take all week, except insofar as it trades off against error-checking the interplanar transit. He'll do it anyway but won't be done today. I can go loan my existing earcuff to the Vanyel here if you like though, that doesn't require any extraordinary outlay of time or effort.
Spell mishap! We're okay but something really weird happened. Remember I mentioned Utumno? I landed in a place that looked just like it, panicked, and teleported back out with the nearest prisoner in tow, who turned out to be Leareth from an alternate future Velgarth operating in an alternate future Arda. Do you want to tell your alternate future self I'm okay for me? He's suspicious.
Vanyel giggles and quickly bites it down, it doesn't really seem like a laughing matter actually. He accepts the earcuff. Puts it on. Looks focused for about thirty seconds.
"...Did it! Took a few tries but I got it." Frown. "He wants to ask a lot of questions, so I might go for a ride with 'Fandes while I answer them, er, if that's all right with you."
He comes back about twenty minutes later. "Bella, I'm so confused about everything right now, but I think he buys that I'm really me, there are a lot of things Leareth couldn't possibly know about my childhood. He says he'll touch base with the others and decide if there's any immediate help they could use with the war effort. Also he's really worried about the Leareth who got tortured, but I told him that you've got to be one of the most qualified people to deal with that in any of the worlds we know about."
"Makes sense." Sigh. She collects the earcuff. "Can I grab some mana off you as long as I'm here before I pop back? - actually I guess it's an open question if I should be here or there while no active work on alternate Leareth is ongoing. Sayshen'd be more comfortable here and I could fill spare time with healing and whatnot."
"Yes, my spell mistargeted! I don't know yet if it was a freak accident or a mistake in the design, though it did get me back to Velgarth all right. I thought I'd see if my room was still available so I can do something useful and be somewhere familiar while I work on that?"
"Uh. No. Uh, so, funny story, actually, it turns out there's an entire other Velgarth and an entire other Arda, and they're both - later? Plus they're undisturbed by me. The Arda's later by more than the Velgarth which is just a few years along. And in that time the Valar pardoned their imprisoned torture-happy counterpart and guess what he went right back to doing, but I recognized the aesthetic and got right out of there with the nearest prisoner."
"What? Oh no. That's not actually funny at all, sorry, I do know what you meant..." Melody lifts a hand to tug at her collar, then rubs her eyes. "Goodness. I hope you told the Valar in your Arda to definitely never do that. Anyway, where were you for the last day, then? Would've thought you'd come back here."
Haven is a much nicer place to hang out, even if Leareth was very accommodating about making a space comfortable for her; by the time they get back, there'll be an entire basement space that's comfy for Companions to stretch their legs in, and some sort of setup other than a Gate that could get her to the surface.
The other Vanyel, at their check-in the next morning, is somewhat warmer with her. He doesn't want to share too many details over the earcuff in case it can be detected by Melkor, but he pretty much believes her now, absurd and weird as her story is. Leareth ended up in Arda at a convenient moment too, so maybe the multiverse is just the sort of place where that happens sometimes. Also his other self thinks Bella is great.
He doesn't see any obvious way to use her magic yet, it's not that combat oriented, but maybe the two Fëanáros will see something when they inevitably spend an entire day talking about magic and languages.
The local Leareth doesn't have much to report. Angband Leareth is still not doing anything except eating per the compulsion to do so. Leareth was considering whether to remove it in a few days, but it seems like anything changing stresses out his alt a lot, so maybe he'll let it be until Bella comes back in a week.
:...I am not sure. I want to help him, obviously, and... Hmm. This is a little hard to explain, but - Nayoki saw his mind, and she compared it to mine, and noticed damage that she thinks is self-inflicted. He...did something to destroy his core memories, that is where he– where both of us keep our sense of self and values. Neither of us is sure why, but I think that is a significant part of why he is unwilling to do anything. And I could help him rebuild it, I think, if he were willing to let me:
All right what are they doing, he knows they're there, why are they just sitting there silently now - he hasn't noticed anyone fiddling in his mind again...
Leareth's main difficulty for the last day or two, at least, is that he's bored. Having nothing happen was kind of restful for a while, though he tried not to include it at all in his anticipations of the future; there were a lot of moments in a row that were each, individually, perfectly fine moments, and he tried to leave it at that.
But now he's bored, and so he keeps ending up having thoughts, and not catching himself before he notices that he's very confused, and then - wanting to be less confused, wondering if his "rescuers" are ever going to tell him what's supposed to be going on before one of them inevitably turns out to be Sauron, again. If there's a plot here, he doesn't have the faintest idea what it is, or why it involves an apparent duplicate of himself reading his mind, and he keeps sort of wanting to know.
...
They're still there.
"If you are planning to read my mind again you can just do it," he says. Speaking feels odd. He doesn't think that he's deliberately done it in a long time.
:I feel as though I ought to be able to offer considerable counterevidence to him being in Angband, but last time he was trying to avoid doing literally any causal inference so I am not hopeful this would help right now. It is very odd to watch a me trying not to think. I suspect I am not very good at not thinking:
If he isn't doing causal inference he'll be very hard to convince! If he is I think - if nothing else I can do a range of weird brain tricks which if Melkor had access to them would kind of mean the side of good was hosed, but also having you around would be convincing...
Having zero beliefs about the state of the world turns out to not be sustainable for that long if he's left completely to his own devices. Which is probably the point, Melkor trying something new to get him to do things, but - well, guessing at what's going to happen isn't taking an action, yet, there's no way for Melkor to use that against him - it might make the torture part happen sooner but at least that would self-correct the part where he's bored enough to have thoughts.
He had been vaguely thinking that the copy-of-himself was the obvious candidate to turn into Sauron at some point, but the maybe-Herald is weirder.
"Are you supposed to be Valdemaran?" he says. "Your accent is wrong."
It's something Melkor could have gotten right if he wanted, Leareth has lots of memories of speaking to Vanyel. It also doesn't feel right for a deliberate slip, though, not that he ought to trust his own judgement of that, or assume that his conclusions have any particular relationship to reality. As long as he's going to be involuntarily thinking anyway, though, he might as well give his thoughts some inputs.
She blinks in momentary surprise. "I'm originally from another universe entirely which is neither an Arda nor a Velgarth, but I lived in a Valinor earlier than your own for nearly twenty years and speak Quenya too, and in Valdemar for some months more recently, where I learned the language there," she says levelly. "My native language is called Pax."
:I am not that much in a hurry? I would be inclined to give him one more week, though, and if he is willing to have a conversation with more than one back-and-forth, I will find him something to do. Being bored is unpleasant, but: a slight smile, :in general I do all of my best intellectual work when I am bored. I set aside a month or two for it sometimes:
Things that Angband Leareth has been doing, for the last week: sleeping as much as he can, which isn’t nearly as much of the time as he would like. Repeatedly noticing himself having preferences about small things, like what position he’s lying in, and sometimes failing to squash them until after he’s already moved. He's tempted to like some food more than other food, decides to be indifferent, mostly succeeds. He lets some of the Healers drag him on walks around the hall; they’re even modelled on some of his actual staff, he thinks, though it’s been long enough that he’s hazy on those recollections. He is absentmindedly annoyed at the compulsions.
He is, at this point, solidly failing on the not having opinions or being curious front. The situation is very baffling. Leareth doesn’t know whether any of the memories he supposedly has back are real, but he pokes at them a bit anyway; they seem to be vaguely in order, in that he has a sense of if one thing happened before another, but they’re not signposted at all, the way memories usually would be by seasons or events.
There are a really large number of fake rescues! Leareth starts numbering them, gets past thirty before losing track without actual notes. The current one stands out in its sheer bizarreness, and the presence of some Velgarth magic that he would have doubted Melkor could fake just as a sensory hallucination, as well as the glacially slow pacing. Some of the others have weird time-skippy bits that must have been smoothed so he didn’t notice, but so far, none have endless days of nothing. ever. happening.
He’s indescribably bored.
On one of the occasions a Healer turns up with food, Leareth makes eye contact with them. “Where are the other people who were here? The one who looks like me, and the girl with the Companion?”
Nod. "You can decide after we go through and draft a summary - though an advantage if I were to speak with him directly is that I could answer his questions immediately without a relaying step. Anyway, we can discuss that later."
He heads down the hall, reaches the other Leareth's room. "You were asking after both of us? We are here now."
"There appear to be two Velgarths, yours later than this one, and two Ardas, the one you were in again later than the other by much more. I'm from a fifth plane called Materia. In a magical accident I landed in the younger Valinor and lived there for about two decades and then the Valar banished me back to Materia, where for some reason no time had passed and I just had the same magical accident over again, this time landing in the younger Haven. When I'd come up with a Materian-style spell to try to regroup with my Quendi friends and try to find some universe more generally hospitable, it mistargeted, landing me and Sayshen, my Companion friend, in your cell in Angband. I recognized the aesthetic of Utumno because I've done Mindhealing-like therapy on Utumno survivors before, and got out of there with you right away and brought you to the Leareth here."
That makes astonishingly little sense, but Leareth isn't inclined to helpfully critique Melkor's storytelling for him, so he just looks flatly at her.
(It's so unnecessarily complicated, which he wants to say 'isn't Melkor's style' although of course that isn't a conclusive argument for anything, if conclusive arguments were still a trustworthy concept at all. Also it has a lot of details that seem...unnecessarily difficult to fake?)
"Why were you doing things to my mind before." There was such an inexplicable lack of followup on that.
"I un-obscured some memories of yours. And I looked for instances of you doing magic other than the Gates that your allies already knew about, since they wanted to know if there was anything they missed. And I calmed you down when you were panicking. Since you weren't very responsive I've been relying on what your alternate universe version has to say about what's justifiable but if you want to contradict him you can, I operate under a professional oath about consent."
Leareth goes quiet for a while.
"Were there?" he says dully, not because he's going to believe the answer, but - it's something he would want to know, if any of this were real, and there's such a mess of memories that he hasn't even begun sorting through all of the earlier ones.
:I am a bit confused. I suspect it bothers him that he did magic for Melkor at all? I cannot really tell what he wants out of this conversation, aside from it being better than utter boredom, but...I at least have an impression that he is thinking now, which means that possibly it would help to provide evidence that Melkor could not fake. ...If I were him, though, I would be so incredibly skeptical about your explanation. It does not sound at all like a plausible set of events in the real world:
:I think I will try talking to him a little, and if it seems obviously unhelpful I will just offer him some innocuous books to read - unfortunately it is hard to think of anything I find very interesting that is also useless to Melkor:
He turns to his alt. "Leareth, if I were in your shoes right now I would be very confused about the situation. I am, in fact, quite confused about it! I had already known of the existence of other worlds, and I suppose so had you, but - this is an entire other level of strangeness."
Leareth gives him a 'no kidding' sort of look.
(Yep, that sounds like him. Faking someone sounding like him can't be that hard, surely, now he's imagining how Melkor could iterate running either half of a dialogue while Leareth himself– no, that doesn't actually work, Leareth is genuinely unsure he could imitate his past, non-tortured self at all, and now he's just thinking himself in circles and is going to stop because it's not like reasoning can lead to justified true beliefs anymore.)
He has not failed to notice that. It makes things even more frustrating, because now both the explanations of 'this is a hallucination' and 'this is real' seem really unlikely, but he can't actually think of a third one. This is way too long and coherent to be a literal dream he's having, and also his dreams nowadays rarely manage an absence of Sauron or Melkor or torture for more than brief snatches.
It shouldn't matter because he can't trust any of his beliefs in the first place, but he's still very annoyed about nothing making sense.
That earns her a very nonplussed look.
Leareth's instinct is just to not answer, and possibly to go back to not interacting, but then he'll be bored again, and - well, answering one way or another is sort of an action, in that it has an effect on the world, but it's a very passive sort of action, it might lead to him being tortured again sooner but he can't see how it could even very indirectly end up with him damaging the wider world.
(Although, if Melkor can actually do compulsions, then why isn't he doing that and making Leareth do whatever he wants...)
Also his stupid brain is curious to see what happens in this version, even if it doesn't matter.
"You can if you want," he says.
He's wondering if she's doing it yet; he can't tell, nothing seems to be in contact with his shields, when the other Leareth was reading him it was very obvious. He's still frustrated, and also sort of panicky in the background; he hates being confused, it's stressful, and liking or hating things isn't safe but he appears to be doing it anyway. He's putting a lot of mental effort into smushing anything that looks even sort of vaguely like an urge to take actions. Some part of him is feeling, sort of petulantly, that it's unfair for neither of the possible explanations to make sense, it's fine if they're indistinguishable and impossible to reason about but this is just infuriating.
Gah. Leareth's emotions can't decide if this is more or less stressful than noticing it, so he just goes with 'stressful', and he tries not to have preferences about that, and stares at her, waiting to see if she's going to do anything that will clarify things even slightly, or at least not be boring for thirty seconds.
He's confused that - there are noticeably compulsions on him and he didn't think Melkor could fake that with a sense-hallucination alone. Maybe Melkor has Vanyel (fear, dread), but Vanyel is going to be bad at compulsions, and these ones actually just feel like his own work? He's...actually pretty confident he didn't do them himself and have the memory erased, to the extent he can be confident in anything, the missing-foundation sense that everything in his mind is untrustworthy is still there and that means he won't get to the point of taking actions. He's not even sure it would work to compulsion yourself into not doing magic, probably you would hit an inability to do magic before finishing it properly?
Also he's confused that Melkor would put in so many details that would at least be annoying to fake this convincingly. Especially the other Leareth. It's so unnecessarily weird.
It doesn't seem that bad to give Melkor any of that information, because it's not like it can possibly be news to him, which is also confusing.
"It's very weird that there are two Velgarths and two Ardas and I'm afraid we don't know anything that explains that, it's just weird, but that's why the compulsions feel like your own, because your alternate self did them.
If you're interested in things that would be annoying to fake convincingly, subtle arts - my Mindhealing-like magic - has a lot of niche uses that pass for college pranks in my world, and I know how to do some of those. Synaesthesia's fun. Or assorted agnosias, less fun but more variety."
Leareth doesn't answer. The small non-panicking corner of him is kind of miffed about it, but it still takes him a minute to calm down enough that he can have thoughts.
That was definitely odd. He isn't sure if Melkor would have a much harder time faking it than either of the senses separately, which he can obviously do.
He's kind of exhausted, and it's hard to think through it.
:I was sitting there the whole time, but for the last bit it seemed that all of the communication happening was him having thoughts at you, which I was not seeing:
He hesitates for a moment, but the question of how much he trusts Bella feels sort of moot at this point, given that he is empirically trusting her with the entirety of 'helping his other self recover from being tortured'. :And, yes, I will try it:
More kinds of synaesthesia, and agnosias are a class of inability to distinguish things that can get bizarrely specific, like 'which finger on your own hand is that' or 'whose face are you looking at'. I can also make it impossible to notice the left halves of things. To be clear, I didn't invest a lot of time in figuring any of this out, it just happens to be really easy with subtle arts.
He's worried about the other Leareth. The worry is pretty well under control, but - it's alarming, seeing another him in that kind of state, knowing that he can be pushed that far, damaged that badly... It's not really surprising, of course, 'multiple subjective years as the prisoner of an evil torture god' is a long way to push someone.
He's doing a lot of trying to predict what the other Leareth is thinking and feeling; he's tempted to just go read him again with Thoughtsensing, but it's clearly not necessary right now and it's so stressful for the other Leareth, he (surprisingly? maybe unsurprisingly) finds that distressing. He's curious, but the main reason he endorses wanting to know the other Leareth's thoughts is because it seems helpful to have an accurate model of his state, in terms of figuring out the best path toward him being okay again, and needlessly reading his mind when it upsets him is clearly not on the best path to him being okay again, so. No.
It's interesting, because he's confused about some of the exact same elements as what the other Leareth must be, but he doesn't have 'all of this is a hallucination' very high among his priors, so his confusion is probably ending up in different places. (He is definitely wondering whether this could be some sort of bizarre simulation, maybe by gods attempting to do Foresight, he's fairly sure that isn't how Velgarth Foresight actually works and he would be a lot more reluctant to create a god here if he thought Their ability to predict and plan relied on creating vast numbers of actually-conscious copies of all the people in the world... But this is all so bizarre, it's worth reconsidering weird hypotheses about reality - he sets that aside for now, though.)
What would the other him be thinking... Well, the compulsions must be pretty confusing, because if Melkor could do compulsions then he would just be making Leareth do lots of magic for him, right? He's not sure if the other Leareth has followed the chain of inference that far. He supposes the other Leareth could be thinking that Melkor already won the war via this method ages ago and is now just having fun, but it would also seem like a weirdly high-effort way for Melkor to amuse himself... Leareth isn't sure because it's not like he personally knows Melkor's tastes or anything. (Why has his life ended up such that the thing he's doing right now is 'trying to model the tastes of a torture god'?)
The other him must be feeling so helpless and scared. Local Leareth hasn't been tortured at all and he would still be freaking out about being stuck somewhere in a confusing situation he couldn't make sense of, with compulsions preventing him from doing magic, he would be so upset about all of that, he feels antsy just imagining it...
He's remembering the glimpse of Nayoki's Sight that she showed him, the crumbled uneven version of his mind, missing the structure at the centre that ought to hold the whole thing together, it's awful - it's sort of his worst nightmare, losing continuity with his past self, he imagines himself in the other Leareth's place and it feels like maybe he could never trust his own mind again, and– he doesn't know what to do, it just hurts.
It's hard, waiting and not knowing. Leareth is pretty good at patience when he has an understanding of the situation and a plan (though this is a hard-earned skill, his younger self wasn't patient at all). He doesn't currently feel like he has a plan, and he's trying to be fine with that, this is still the orienting stage, but it takes some effort.
Nod. Bella can stop reading his thoughts if she hasn't already, Leareth thinks. (It's mildly uncomfortable that he can't tell if she's doing it, it doesn't seem to interact with Mindspeech shields at all and she could be doing it all the time for all he knew, but - well, he has a decent amount of evidence from her actions that this isn't the kind of thing she would do.)
"Thank you," he says. "I will have someone bring him some innocuous books to read if he wants. You will come back tomorrow?"
:That makes sense. We also, er, had a proposal to offer you, if this is something you're able to do: Short pause. :You're claiming to have an inter-world teleport spell but we don't in fact have proof of that, yet, since we can't walk into Angband and check that Leareth is really gone. But, um, if you're done checking the spell, and you can just teleport a person the way you contacted me if you've met another them - you and the young Fëanáro should have met a Ninquë who was an advisor of Finwë's, and if that's all it takes, you have our permission to grab him and then he can see your Velgarth and Arda directly and we'll know you actually can transport people that way:
Right. I developed that spell and its reverse to allow people to visit loved ones between Valinor and Endorë, at first it didn't transport the caster at all. Fëanáro came up with a teleport that the caster could use to get around, and I grabbed that, and the interplanar transit spell is more like that than the older versions. I can still smash 'em together and get one that works like you have in mind but I'm not even done with all the error checking yet - if there were no time constraints at all I'd really like to redesign the spell from the ground up and try to get it so it has no failure rate at all because, uh, it dropped me in Angband.
:That's a pretty bad problem for a spell to have! Hmm. I'm going to have to think more about how we can verify this if we can't do it that way, but - in theory, could you do the interplanar transit version to get yourself to a place you've been in Valinor, except in our Arda - and then transit one of us back with you to our Velgarth - and then do the in-world teleport version to send them to a place we'd been but you hadn't, and retrieve them, and then go back to our Arda?:
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.)
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."
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.
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...
...Well, now Leareth is thinking approximately the same things, but calmly, and mostly feeling very stuck.
He's noting, quietly to himself, that even if this is real, he still has to assume that taking actions in the world isn't safe, since Melkor knows how to destroy and reshape people, he has to assume he's been permanently compromised at this point. Which means it doesn't matter either way - except, he would still prefer to have a probability estimate on torture happening soon, even if it's not decision-relevant.
"Well, I'm not going to torture you but I suppose having me just say that isn't very helpful. I don't think you have to assume you're permanently compromised, but it's normal for recovery to take a very, very long time, and if you need a very very long time, that's - not in a general sense all right but it's strategically all right, I think, there's no specific hurry."
That makes sense, in the version where this is real, there's another Leareth, who can presumably handle all the usual Leareth things - is he advising the people in charge of the war effort right now, that seems important. (Leareth isn't very worried about giving Melkor information, here, since he was captured before even exchanging hellos with Vanyel, and has no idea what's been happening since.)
...Honestly, in the version where this is real, it seems possible, from a strategic perspective, that the other Leareth should just kill him rather than trying to fix him - he's not useful, he won't be for a very very long time if ever, and in the meantime he's just taking up resources, which they probably don't have to spare if there's a war still going on.
It's scary to think about in a distant way, he doesn't want to die, and...he's finding it weirdly hard to model how his past self would have felt about that. But, well, other Leareth should know that he would understand the necessity.
(Leareth isn't at all worried about giving Melkor reasons to kill him, there is a zero percent chance Melkor is ever going to do that. At worst he's going to find this hilarious.)
Leareth had actually been thinking that the other him could disable it, trivially. It seems like a terrible idea to risk him dying and coming back right now, given the whole 'compromised by Melkor' thing - although, on reflection, it's not clear it would work. He needs to - fight, a bit, to contest for his new body with its previous inhabitant, and right now he probably just...wouldn't... He has no idea what would happen then, actually. Maybe he would get evicted and come back again and repeat the whole process over and over, which sounds incredibly stupid.
(Leareth is, on reflex, not thinking about the details of his setup; this is a pre-existing habit, longstanding, because Velgarth contains a lot of mind-readers and there's one thing he wants the gods to never, ever hear the faintest whisper about.)
She doesn't say anything right away; she goes pretty still.
I really think, she tells Local Leareth, that even if you weren't going to tell me your immortality method kills people, it would have been due diligence to ask me if I were prone to mercy-kills, before putting me in a room with your similarly immortal alt who has been through Angband.
Local Leareth freezes halfway through writing a sentence. He should have thought of that, and he didn't, and he's not even sure why he didn't - well, he definitely didn't imagine the scenario where Bella mercy-killed the other Leareth without asking him, it still seems very implausible. And he hadn't thought she would learn it, because he's so cagey with that information and had vaguely expected another him would be too, but of course the other Leareth is different, probably less in control of his thoughts, and...in short, he really, really should have thought of it.
:I am sorry. You are correct. I ought to have reassessed my policy here, and told you, as soon as this happened. What were you talking about such that it even came up?:
Leareth wants to ask how that ended up being relevant, but doesn't.
:I try not to make the same mistakes repeatedly: he sends, :so I am going to come over there right now, and tell you all of it, in private Mindspeech. Please be aware that this is something literally nobody in my organization knows the details of, since I wish to avoid giving the gods any more ideas:
:All right, you may do that:
Leareth is thinking that his immortality setup is a spell (still unspecified in its details) which hides his spirit as soon as he dies, so it doesn't get snatched by the local god's usual afterlife process, and then - allows it to find a new body. Specifically it has to be the body of one of his original incarnation's descendants, but he was very prolific about that at the very start, and two thousand years is a long time. Probably it wouldn't be possible for the gods to eradicate all of them at this point even if they made a concerted effort, but he doesn't want to give them an incentive to try.
He tries to die as rarely as possible, because killing people is actually bad and something he prefers to do less of, and nowadays that he's better at avoiding being murdered by gods and has centuries worth of magical research in life extension, he can generally stretch each body close to two hundred years.
:He is maybe twenty years older than I am, so - ordinarily I would think at least a century, but also he spent several years with his magic blocked being tortured, which one assumes does not help. My Healers were not sure how much damage was done and whether it is reversible. Almost certainly he has fifty years, though:
:I am not sure if it would help to have a number of additional very clever people on the project, but that is a resource I could offer you if you wished. It is somewhat self-interested of me, of course, but also this would benefit you greatly. ...If I have not already said this, I would also offer you our life extension magic, if you need longer to work on the problem:
Angband Leareth notices that she's been quiet for a bit. He assumes she's having a Mindspeech conversation with the other Leareth on the question of killing him. Which really should be less aaaaaaa than it is, given that it was his idea. He can't get very worked up about it, since she's still keeping him calm.
(He's realizing that he can't remember a name for her or whether she introduced herself at any point.)
I don't know yet if what the Valar did has stuck or not, but if I look thirty when I'm fifty, I'll take you up on that. Adding people requires them to take a while to get up to speed, so it's not straightforwardly helpful.
And to Angband Leareth:
"Sorry, you're right I was talking to him but it was actually about how he hadn't mentioned how his immortality worked.
I'm Bella."
Oh no, now the other Leareth is probably furious about him accidentally revealing that. He had assumed she knew - Vanyel knew that much, he thinks, or had deduced it, although maybe not until later than this Velgarth, the memories of it are pretty hazy and feel like they happened several lifetimes ago.
Leareth is kind of dubious, but mostly on the usual grounds, not expecting people's words to correlate especially with reality. The other Leareth not being angry also seems consistent, since it's not like being angry after the fact helps anything, and Leareth doesn't think he spent much time being angry before all of this. It's a little surprising that the other Leareth thought he should have told Bella sooner, but then again, clearly he trusts her a lot.
...Which is weird in itself, really. Maybe it's weird because it isn't real. Leareth holds it up, tries to decide if it's the kind of off note that, if evidence meant anything, would mean this was probably a hallucination after all. He's not sure? He didn't trust many people, before, but he ended up putting a lot of trust in Vanyel and Maitimo, albeit from several removes. The only way he was able to admit defeat and give up was because he knew there were other people who could pick up the fight instead.
Start at the beginning. "Bella landed in Haven, not here. In addition to her Mindhealing-like subtle arts ability, she can do something called arcane magic, which is different from our kind. I first encountered rumours of her miraculous-seeming healing magic that could regrow missing limbs, which I discounted, and then I heard of her flying and otherwise being very impressive in rescuing people from a fire. I attempted to ask Vanyel about this, in one of our dreams, and he had in the meantime learned to relay Mindspeech from dreams, and so was pulling her in. At this point I had evidence of her altruism in general, but nothing very specific. I then learned from a spy that she had approximately invented the experimental study of arcane magic, after arriving in the other Arda, because in her home world, the process of doing science does not work. I was extremely impressed, and - well, it represented a vast opportunity, the resources available in other worlds, and...I hoped it might mean that I could refactor some of my - our - plans, if I could obtain her cooperation."
"She recognized, and followed, my spy, and we ended up speaking with him as an intermediary, using a magical artifact she made that increases the range of Mind-Gifts. She could also use it to directly use any of her subtle arts powers, which you can imagine are very dangerous as well as useful. I was very aware that if she were my enemy, she would have many routes to disable me. She did not do so."
He glances at Bella. "I was concerned she would attract the attention of our gods, and made an offer to help if ever she were in lethal danger. At some point, she took me up on this, because after one very ineffectual attempt, I assume by the Star-Eyed, to send Need for her, Vkandis escalated to attacking Haven with his personal army."
"I was also not aware until then that Vkandis had a personal army! They were from Iftel and had been keeping in form, despite millennia of peacetime, via an entire industry of blood-sports. It was very surprising! I suppose this is something your Velgarth ought to know. Anyway, she teleported me in with her spell; I shielded their House of Healing for a time, and walked a local Mindhealer through using node-boosted set-commands to incapacitate most of the gryphon cavalry. Bella did the rest, and then I decided to evacuate us - Vanyel as well, he had been injured by the enemy troops' Gate in - and took her north. Bella had a very good opportunity to sabotage my organization, and did not take it. She was also rather angry with me over my methods, on several occasions, but rather than trying to fight, she helped implement the changes she had made a case for, and was flexible on a few items where I argued the necessity. She knows the full plan and did not react with hostility, although she obviously was concerned about the risks and appalled by the cost, as any sane person would be. Before she found you, she had been intending to explore other worlds, and then revisit the question of us cooperating once she had more substantial resources of her own. Quite understandable on her part. Instead, she immediately rescued 'me' and tried to contact my organization, and has since then been trying to help you, even at significant cost and inconvenience to herself, while also doing her best to assist with your Arda's war."
"Anyway. I do not expect her judgement to always align with mine, but when it diverges, I think it is entirely possible that she will be right, and the difference will be that she has spent decades in paradise and I have not. I trust her to care about the world being good, for a definition of 'good' that is close enough to mine that it counts, and I trust her to be clever and actually trying. Vanyel has great respect for her, which I consider additional evidence about her character. Also, she has some idea of how to help you, and I really do not."
"Uh, a world where science is impossible means that if you try to do a scientific experiment, the world itself gets angry at you and the best case scenario is that it doesn't kill you in the process of informing you of this. There's a fairly high peak standard of living and state of knowledge, but all of that has to be derived by non-science methods, like practice and intuition and divination magic and stuff like that, never by trying slightly different things many times to see what happens."
Leareth sits bolt upright. He can only manage a sort of abstract alarm and horror about it, since Bella is still doing the calming effect, but - gods, that's one of the most appalling things he's ever heard. It's maybe slightly less appalling than the entire concept of Angband, because it's difficult for anything to rival that, but still.
"So your - arcane magic, was from that world, and then you used experimentation to refine it once you were in Arda?" It's surprising hard to communicate in actual sentences with his actual mouth, but Leareth thinks it's probably some kind of suboptimal for him to only participate in the conversation via having his mind read; at the very least, he isn't sure if Bella is relaying anything to the other Leareth.
She can relay to him if she wants, Leareth thinks, although she doesn't have to if it's too much work or anything, he can make more effort to say things out loud. If it's really another Leareth, then these are kind of his thoughts too, and if it's not real then it remains the case that none of his preferences matter.
"Where did you get to?" he asks. (Asking also seems like a harmless action if this is a hallucination, what's he supposed to do with stories of made-up magic from a made-up other world, but he does still run that check.)
"Relaying now," she says, and she bounces what she's reading. "Uh, the healing spell was mentioned, and I can teleport, and there's an artifact called a crystal ball that can do something like scrying but is specialized for scrying imaginary locations where information is stored like a library that takes up no space, and my boots are magic and make me not clumsy, and the earcuff was mentioned, and I had a necklace to counteract the psychological slowdown effect in Valinor but the Valar broke most of them, and I can fly..."
Leareth nods. He's kind of starting to bounce off the conversation. It's interesting in an abstract way, but it's not relieving any confusion right now, if it ever was - he's ending up sort of shoving the contents in a box labeled 'probably fake'. Mostly he's tired, and tired of things not making sense, and ironically, starting to feel kind of overstimulated, but he doesn't want to tell them to go away because then Bella will stop doing the calm thing, and he's failing at being indifferent to that.
Leareth takes a deep breath. It really isn't any scarier than being asleep here on his own, which he keeps trying to do. Being here without any magic is terrifying in itself, but letting Bella put him to sleep doesn't make it worse. Also, trying and failing to sleep is very unpleasant and he's been doing that a lot lately.
:I wonder if part of the difference is that his previous experience contains things that, to his knowledge, Melkor cannot fake and has not included in past hallucinations? Much of his productive confusion seems to be around the compulsions. I imagine that the Elves you saw before would not have had things like that. ...Also, he might have been there for a shorter time period. I am not sure how long the previous war was, but in this case it was only five months of outside world time:
Which is clearly plenty to very thoroughly damage a Leareth, but...maybe, hopefully, in a way that's not as slow to fix.
:Also he is a me, and apparently I am worse at handling boredom than I realized! He is trying so hard not to finish lines of thought and he is so bad at it: Leareth is smiling, sort of fondly. :I am glad he wanted you to relay his thoughts, even if I am sort of confused about the justification there:
Angband Leareth is overall relieved when she doesn't make an appearance the next day and neither does his alt.
He pokes at his memories of the conversation, which aren't as clear and ordered as he likes, his memory is terrible right now for some reason and he didn't take notes because he doesn't have paper for it and asking feels too much like a decision to - to something.
He's still confused. Nothing makes sense and he's tired and maybe for a while he'll go back to not trying, because trying isn't safe and it's not even working.
...
This lasts most of the day, but then the restlessness is back. He sates it for a while by reading, but then he finds himself wandering around the various hypotheticals again. It's all sort of fake, right, he can't actually draw inferences about his situation this way, because even if he's not still in the hands of an evil god, his mind is broken and it's not safe. But he can still ask the what-if, as long as he reminds himself not to believe it.
Leareth does this for maybe an hour and then he's exhausted again and also sort of panicking for very unclear reasons - it takes a while and a lot of effort to calm down, he sort of wishes Bella were there to just make it stop, but asking for her to come here is too close to trying to influence the world, so he doesn't.
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?:
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leareth does the due diligence of thirty seconds thinking about it.
:Honestly, he would know literally everything that I did before your arrival, since he is from further in the future. We already explained you. Even on the very remote chance that this will end up mattering, I do not actually know much about the war in Arda. I think that seems fine, if he wants it:
Local Leareth might as well head over, while he's thinking thoughts to be bounced.
He's sympathetic to Angband Leareth's confusion, and presumed frustration about it. Things not making sense is terrible. He's thinking that a number of things about his alt's situation would be driving him up the wall, despite the fact that he hasn't experienced Angband. Being stuck somewhere without control of his environment, not having magic, not having - goals or plans - or even knowing what reality is. It's hard to imagine how awful he would find that.
Probably his alt has found some way of dealing with it, though, Leareth wouldn't let himself go on being any more miserable than the adaptive level of misery, if he could avoid it, and it seems like the other Leareth has found a stance toward himself and his own mind that - reduces the tension, or pressure, or something.
That's probably hard to shift back from. And it's probably terrifying in both directions, actually.
He wishes he could help more with the war effort in Arda, but the people over there are being understandably cagey, so he can't. It sounds like adult Vanyel is really quite competent, though.
He absorbs the thoughts, so familiar yet alien. There are no notes of off-ness at all, and he doesn't have any memories of Melkor getting thoughts convincingly for even a second, generally the rescue hallucinations just involved him not having access to Thoughtsensing.
...If he could read Maitimo's thoughts, that would actually be pretty convincing, given that he spent a while doing that all the time, he has that baseline. Also Melkor can't get just Maitimo's exterior perfectly even when it sure looks like he's trying to rather than leave deliberate discrepancies. That does not seem logistically feasible though.
(Vague memories of Maitimo starting out with nowhere near the level of paranoia appropriate for a war with a god, and then - getting there. He almost certainly won't agree to something like that and if he does Leareth ought to be suspicious on principle.)
Leareth is feeling kind of overwhelmed again, in a way that pushes away from curiosity. Although, while he's thinking of things, he does sort of want paper to write on, he's not sure how much he'll trust himself to use it but he could at least count days. He has no idea how long it's been.
"I will do that. Also, Nayoki said you had some other kind of block? She was not sure if it would be less obtrusive than our usual compulsions; she did say it took you all day, which I suppose is a significant cost. Nayoki would also be delighted to hear from her older self about research progress."
"When I do anything complicated, I might misstep and do something else. Usually I'd be able to undo it right away, or undo it after whoever I was working on noticed if I didn't catch myself at the time, but that's not guaranteed. Also, it's harder to do something that's intended to be temporary but isn't intended to be allowed to wear off within a few days. Usually I can either do something gently enough it'll knock loose soon after I stop actively pushing on it, or hard enough it'll stay forever. Side effects are generally going to be at least loosely related to whatever I was trying to do - if I stop him from doing magic he might wind up generally catatonic or unable to think effectively about magic or something in that vein but would not wind up compulsively, uh, singing or anything like that. I have never actually made a mistake like this and going slowly makes it less likely. I don't know how likely it is a Mindhealer could fix an error I couldn't."
"That makes sense. Nayoki thinks that anything done by a Mindhealer, with the exception of literally burning out areas of a mind - which is impossible to do by accident - is straightforwardly reversible by another Mindhealer, if they have good enough control. She is not sure that she does, yet, she is very young and has not been here that long. Mindhealers cannot easily undo mage-compulsions, however, though they can reliably find them." Frown. "It is probably not worth risking potentially irreversible mistakes, at this point?"
"Does the other me know about your existence? If I am startled I might react with hostility." Nayoki thinks. "I wonder if it would be safer to contact a different person on Leareth's staff first. Probably Tadri is not, in the other world, he only ended up working here due to circumstances around your arrival, but I could ask around and probably we can find someone who is likely to still be here in fifteen years' time."
In general, yes, through several intermediate steps; he's never met Nayoki, but Leareth was in communication with his people before being captured, and sent a diplomatic party to inform King Randale of why he had, well, sort of half kidnapped Vanyel. (The agent who found him did ask him first, just, he had about five seconds to think.)
No one in the other Velgarth knows about Bella's existence, though, since it hasn't ended up being relevant to any requests for aid, yet, and they're pretty sure this isn't a trick by Melkor at this point but aren't totally sure Bella and the others are operating in good faith here, and are being paranoid.
:Right, 'Mindhealer' and 'works for Leareth' would seem like a bad person to startle. Er, if it's a specific Mindhealing thing you need, I'll probably know off the top of my head if Melody could do it. And I'm confident she wouldn't hurt you even if she were surprised:
Then they'll spend the next candlemark talking, unless Bella asks for the earcuff back first. There's a lot of catching up to do; this conversation is even weirder than the last.
Afterward, though, local Vanyel tells Bella that he feels somewhat more confident he'll be able to hold a reasonable conversation with traumatized Leareth, at least on his end. He wants to know if there are topics he should avoid because they'll upset Leareth a lot, though, having a lot of firsthand experience with that.
"Mmm. Well, you can tell me, and I think Savil will cover for me on short notice if I say I have important reasons even if I don't say what - er, I haven't actually explained it to her because I wasn't sure if it was private and I think she's still pretty wary about Leareth in general."
Yeah, it's confusing, I acknowledge that. Can you be a relay for me - I'd like to listen through your ears and tell you things you can tell her, I can do that without picking up anything else I shouldn't - till it would be a good idea for me to talk to her directly?
Your alternate self would like to catch up on your research projects. We're in contact with your world's Vanyel and some of the Quendi he's with already but apparently communications between you and they aren't good enough that they could warn you, so I did this instead. I didn't want to contact you directly because the artifact I'm using closes distance for mental communication and mind-altering Gifts in both directions and startling you could have been a bad idea for that reason but I'm happy to switch any time if you promise not to try to melt my brain; I've never actually tested my shields against Mindhealing and don't really want to.
You can talk to her but tomorrow would be better - both this artifact and the way I get around use a resource called mana and I can't use the artifact to close distance with two people at once so I'd have to go to her in person or do a lot of awkward switching.
The older Nayoki spends ten minutes or so asking fairly specific questions about the state of both Valdemar and of Leareth's organization (Bella probably won't know the answers to everything but she'll know some.)
Then she asks what Bella knows about the state of the war effort in Arda, and how on earth she found out about that in the first place.
Uh, the Leareth you've met mentioned you and apparently he used to read your mind a lot. He thinks replicating the experience would be hard to fake but obviously this would involve having your mind read which would be understandable to never want and also I'd have to relay which would be understandable to additionally and separately not want, even though I'd consider anything I got that way to fall under my rules of confidentiality, which may or may not have filtered to you if Fëanáro complained about them or something.
We were contacted a month ago by persons claiming to be from another Velgarth and another Arda, earlier in their respective histories, and with a bewildering number of related claims most of which we are not presently dedicating any effort to verifying. Their goals are unclear and we are planning to mostly ignore them, although if this was a plot to distract the King with unfamiliar languages to learn it has met with an expected degree of success. I've given particularly little attention to their claim they have you, which is distracting out of all proportion to its strategic relevance. But whether or not they do, when this war is over, we will get you back and we will fix this, no matter how many years or worlds it takes.
He's very ambitious and very talented, he achieved a lot of important things especially in the leadup to the Noldor departing Valinor. He has high expectations. The last few decades have been challenging because of Melkor's interference; before that I think he was very happy. He invented a new script for writing for one of my brothers, who has trouble with getting letters mixed in his head when he reads.
Angband Leareth is ready to sleep before Bella's bedtime (he's rarely anywhere except his bed), and agrees to it with gratitude albeit not very much interaction.
He doesn't ask to talk to her the next day. Instead he writes some very cryptic notes to himself on the torn-out notebook pages.
The two Nayokis talk!
It doesn't take long for both to be convinced of the other's veracity, and they talk research, relaying through Bella. Older Nayoki has a proven-fully-reversible method of blocking Gifts, but even the least invasive version isn't side-effect-free. That being said, she's deduced that Melody in the other Velgarth has some sort of newly-invented method for blocking Gifts, which might or might not be better. (There are a number of ways of blocking Gifts that older Nayoki has discovered, but most of them are either not fully reversible or have side effects or don't work reliably.)
The easiest way to convey it would be between two people who are both Mindhealers. Local Nayoki would understand if Bella still isn't comfortable lending the earcuff to her, but if she's comfortable lending it to local Melody, then Melody could learn the technique from her alt and then pass it on to Nayoki.
Well, Melody can take the earcuff and try it.
...After a few tries, it works!
The Mindhealing technique for safely and reversibly blocking Gifts turns out to be fairly easy to explain; the hardest part is other-Melody finding someone willing to be grabbed and have it demonstrated on their Gift so that local-Melody can observe.
Twenty minutes later, though, local Melody takes off the earcuff. "Huh! I would never, ever have thought to do that. It wasn't even me, actually, it was my eleven-year-old student who I apparently have in the future, I'm told she's very, er, creative. And she got the idea from some weird mushroom I've never heard off that partially scrambles Gifts, combined with the fact that she used to go around sneaking peeks with her Sight all the time. Sounds like she really could have used an ethics lecture from you, actually. Anyway, I've got it, I could pass it on to our Nayoki and then she can use it for whatever she needs?"
Angband Leareth seems indifferent when asked about the mealtime compulsion, but they try taking it off anyway and he's eating enough on his own, at least averaged, he skips meals sometimes. He asks for more paper. The Healers offer him baths every so often and he finally takes them up on it.
He freaks out a surprising amount about the suggestion that they cut his hair, though; it's matted and gross and that seems to them like the least hassle-y way of dealing with it, but Nayoki and her Healer colleague gamely spend a few candlemarks untangling it instead.
He is cooperative about being put to sleep every night, but doesn't interact other than thinking at her that he's ready.
It's not until another week later that, during the bedtime earcuff contact, he also thinks that if she wanted to come by in the next day or two then he wouldn't mind talking to her.
Having warning is helpful and Melody can free up her morning for it; actually teaching Nayoki her technique shouldn't take that long, but she figures there might be other tidbits to exchange while she's there anyway, Mindhealers don't have a chance to work together very often since there are so few of them.
Angband Leareth seems a bit sharper, or more present, maybe it's the fact that he's been somewhat more reliably getting sleep. (He still gets woken a lot by nightmares, but consistently having that first block of the night at the same time helps a lot.)
He fixes his eyes on a point just left of her head. "I want you to show me the other things you can do with the other world not-Mindhealing."
...Honestly, all of those sound like things where doing one wouldn't leave him in any shape to do the others. The question of what order deserves some thought.
"Can you leave the message from Maitimo here for later, if it is in writing?" In the world where this is real, it's not going to mysteriously vanish from his table, and if this isn't real then it doesn't matter anyway.
"Thank you." He considers for a bit. "I...think that I want to see Vanyel first." That one feels less - real? Less like it's ever going to come again if he doesn't take it now? It's hard to describe what, just, he hasn't actually seen supposed-younger-Vanyel yet and has only words claiming his existence.
Having preferences about whether or not things startle him still seems weird, but if she prefers not to startle him then she's welcome to do it in the hall.
...Leareth remembers that she might not be reading his thoughts, she didn't ask yet. It seems hard to convey properly. "You can do it in the hall if you like."
The other traumatized Leareth looks - pretty awful, actually, and the way he's holding himself is so visibly scared, which is so out of context for him, and aaaaaa.
"I, er, talked to the older Vanyel," he says finally. "About things that we - that he and you spoke about in what would be my future."
"He's really grateful for what you did during the war, before he arrived." Is talking about the war a horrible idea that will upset Leareth? Maybe! "He - there was a lot of admiration, there, he says he couldn't have pulled it off, figuring out what was going on fast enough. He's not sure anyone but you could have. And he doesn't think he could be doing any of what he is now if he hadn't learned from you."
Deep breath. "He was worried that you'd think he was mad, about you doing a few Gates for the Enemy, and he told me that he's not mad at all. Even when he wasn't sure if it was you being tricked or if you'd voluntarily joined him, he wasn't really angry, but he definitely isn't now."
"Am I what? Angry? No! Why would I be angry with you for - for taking a lot of risks trying to help a world that wasn't even yours, and getting captured, and having an evil god control all of your experiences and memories until... The other Vanyel said it took three months before that happened, which would've been years to you. I wouldn't have held out that long. And - I know you would've only done it if made sense, given what you knew, and it's, it's not your fault that someone else was controlling all that and could try it over as many times as they wanted–"
Angband Leareth listens without moving, he seems to be holding his breath - and then very abruptly he starts crying. It seems for a moment like maybe he's going to say something else anyway, but he doesn't, only scrunches back down in the bed and pulls the covers over his head.
It's very stupid to be hiding under a blanket when both the people he's hiding from have magic, but the mental move to un-blanket himself isn't working and no amount of willpower he can apply is unsticking it.
"You can keep saying things if you want," Leareth says after nearly thirty seconds of being stuck. He's a bit hard to hear, due to being blanketed, but understandable.
"You're talking about the Krebain thing? I'm not mad about that." He scrunches up his face. "All right, I'm a little prickly about it, because murdering mage-gifted kids is horrible - I know, you mostly kidnapped them, that's also horrible. But - it seems like it was mostly a god thing, right? And - I think that was the determining factor, I mean, if there hadn't been a god who wanted me to be stupidly powerful then probably all the coincidences wouldn't have lined up that way, it took a lot of them, and if there had been, but you hadn't supplied Krebain, then it would've just found another way to happen all the same." Shrug. "I talked about it a lot with the other Vanyel."
"Oh, no, that's completely right, the other me says it took almost a decade before he could really talk about Tylendel with people. But, um..."
:Bella, I'm allowed to tell him about you being my therapist, right, if I want? It's just you aren't allowed to talk about it without my permission?:
:Slandering you would be the opposite of helpful, really:
"Um, Bella has the subtle arts thing which is like Mindhealing, and I've been seeing her as a therapist for a while now, and it helped a lot. Other me said he was kind of jealous even though he mostly figured out things on his own, eventually. He says it'll save me a lot of stupid decisions I would've made, though."
:That makes sense:
"Leareth, there's another thing the other Vanyel said I could tell you," he says, slowly. "He went on a research mission, right, I'm sure you knew that. And - he found some of Urtho's journals, which had survived the Cataclysm. They're in Kata'shin'a'in now."
Vanyel can't tell if that's good or bad or just noise, but he forges ahead. "Sorry, I'm missing a lot of the context here, other Vanyel has more, but he gave me this bit. Urtho admired you, he wrote that you were his best student, and - the war wasn't your fault, and Urtho regretted it at the end."
"Sure." She undoes the prosopagnosia and calms him and does an associative visual agnosia. "The first one was faces, this one does objects." There aren't that many objects in the room, but she can float a fork from his lunch over and offer it to him. "What's that?"
He explores that one for a couple of minutes, and then yawns. He's getting very tired, and the buzzing-overwhelm feeling is hovering around the edges of his mind, kept at bay by the calm-effect but encroaching. The marginal value of more information here is dropping. Asking her to leave is a decision, though, and he gets stuck on it and just looks at her.
She is! She's also bubbling over with general enthusiasm. "We covered a couple of other things, it seems like we'd picked up different styles - Nayoki's Sight is so different from mine, we can See all the same things and do all the same things but the, hmm, the emphasis is different? And so we've gone in different directions, but I'm really interested by hers."
Angband Leareth sleeps. Wakes. Sifts through the conversations he remembers, vaguely wishing he could have taken notes that he trusted.
He remembers the message from Maitimo. It still takes a massive effort of will to pick it up, and again to unfold it. He reads it.
...What would he be feeling, in the world where this was real?
Relieved; at least he knows someone is being the right amount of paranoid. Grateful. Touched. Wishing he could see Maitimo again.
An emotion is a very long way from an action. It would give Melkor information, of course, but - mostly information he already has, and information he could use to torture Leareth more, not coax him into acting.
He lets himself feel the emotions, just for a little while. Cries, hiding under his blankets.
Velgarth Mindhealing has a very recognizable feel, and this isn't a technique Leareth has experienced before; he can feel his Gifts slowly slipping out of his awareness. It's almost like Bella's agnosias, they're there, he's just...forgotten how to use that part of his mind. It's a lot more thorough, though, by the time she's done.
(It's also terrifying, and he lies still and shakes and fights to keep his breathing even, but even with most of him panicking, there's still a corner that can notice things.)
At that point he's exhausted again, and skips supper because he isn't hungry and sitting up to eat is too hard. He's more than ready to sleep by the time Bella asks him.
Or the day after that. He's thinking, and it's easier to do uninterrupted, well, spread out during the stretches of time where he can make his brain do anything.
For the hypotheticals-game where reasoning works, he has a list in his head of points in favour of still-in-Angband and points against; local Vanyel's startling emotional stability is a point in favour of still-Angband, he thinks, albeit a confusing one; but there are too many items on both lists, it feels formless, he can't just count them because some are stronger than others. Usually he would get a sense of the gestalt, but that requires trusting his intuitions, parts of his own mind that he can't fully see, and he doesn't. Even in the world where he's rescued, his mind is still compromised.
Are there any individual observations that are conclusive, one way or another?
Melkor shouldn't be able to imitate Mindhealing. But he could, conceivably, have somehow forced someone - Vanyel? - to Gate back to Velgarth, and grabbed a Mindhealer. It seems well outside the domain of plausibility but it's possible.
Bella's subtle arts power is not Mindhealing. It's too precise and doesn't have the noticeable side effects. She can read his thoughts directly through his shields. She can reach in and close the part of him that recognizes faces, while touching nothing else. That's not a sense-hallucination. He could have drawn the lines of her face perfectly, it just didn't look like her, or like anything interesting at all really. That's a lot deeper in than memories and senses and even thoughts.
...If Melkor could do that, why in all hells would he have bothered with the kind of repeated memory erasures and tries at convincing him? He had eventually noticed; that's why he destroyed his own core sense of self and motives, so Melkor couldn't use it against him. But if Melkor could fiddle with minds on the level of detail that Bella can, he could have just selectively shut down some of Leareth's cognitive faculties, and then shut down his ability to notice... And he wouldn't have let Leareth shred himself, Leareth is far less useful to him like this even if he's a lot of fun to torture, and Melkor isn't stupid.
If Melkor could do all that, he wouldn't have needed a centuries-long plot to foment the civil war, by impersonating people and spreading rumours, he could have gone in and changed people's goals.
The entire arc of Arda for the last thousand years makes no sense, in the world where Melkor can do this. And he could posit that Melkor found a world like Bella's world recently, gained that magic, but - one, if he had the power to travel between worlds then he should have won the war instantly, and two, that's already cancelling out much of the complexity-penalty on the alternate explanation. Which is that absurd shenanigans resulted in a human from two worlds away, with a friendly Companion at her side, making a mistake in her spell and landing in just the right place to pull him out, back to an earlier version of his own world complete with local version of him.
Gah.
...
Leareth's head hurts. He bounces off thinking about it for a couple of days, just reads boring books and sleeps and stares at the wall, noticing that he's not being tortured and that's nice.
...
It's pretty conclusive, though, that positing Melkor having Bella's powers explains too much, it predicts additional wins that he knows aren't true.
At this point, he thinks, a sane person would just conclude that they weren't in Angband anymore.
Leareth isn't, currently, very sane, and knows it, but - in the end, he has to figure out what he believes on his own. It's been a game so far, to make it safe at all, but there are real stakes.
He can't. He spends the next hour or two pointlessly panicking over the fact that he could have had a belief about what reality was and notsafenotsafenotsafe–
...
Some formless number of days later, Leareth forces himself to look at it again. Why does it matter, that he end up with an accurate belief here?
Because there's a world, out there, and - and if he's out, then there's probably still a war going on, and people might die - Vanyel might die, Maitimo might die - and that still matters, even if he's broken...
He teeters on the edge of it for a long time.
I think I am not in Angband anymore.
Angband Leareth is thinking that he should plausibly have come up with some kind of PLAN before he became unexpectedly INCAPABLE of thinking or communicating or understanding what people were saying to him, due to being too upset. Not that he was very capable of planning before.
He thinks he wants to talk to her, but also saying words is incredibly hard.
"Can you. Read my mind again."
Leareth is thinking that he's pretty sure he isn't in Angband anymore. He thinks this for a number of reasons but mostly because the war and his captivity would both have looked very different if Melkor's powers included the generator behind 'give people random agnosias', and at a certain point it was just definitely more parsimonious to instead conclude that not that.
He remembers having that thought and still being stuck for days on having forgotten how to have beliefs about what reality is and it being too terrifying to try, and then he made that leap, and then he was stuck again on 'what now', and it seemed like maybe some actions still weren't safe but having emotions was, and then...this.
Apparently being not in Angband is really scary! This honestly seems kind of stupid of his brain!
That would make sense, but he doesn't think it's right?
For one, he's numbered at least fifty fake rescue memories, there can't be that many more, and he was always upset and scared, and sometimes genuinely caught off guard, when things inevitably became horrible again, but - it wasn't because he'd formed a belief about being out, he was never confused enough for his brain to start gnawing on itself until it generated hypotheses about reality, he was trying really hard to not ever do that.
He did find a couple of memories, eventually, where he was left alone for weeks or months, long enough to get bored - initially he'd been thinking that didn't usually happen - but he had still been in Arda, without inexplicable compulsions and definitely without weird agnosia-causing otherworldly powers being used on him, and so he hadn't been confused enough to get really frustrated about it. It turns out he really hates being confused.
Maybe it's that? Implications of something feels right. Implications of his actions having real consequences? There are stakes, and he - there was something he cared about once - he doesn't know what it was because it wasn't safe to try or care or have goals in Angband, it was just a lever that could be used against him - but it's got to still be out there, and still matter, and...and that's terrifying, that maybe it's over now but it's still too late, he already destroyed the parts of him that were good for anything and he can't get them back.
He's scared, though it's muted behind the calm. It takes some effort to unpack why.
...Is he afraid the other Leareth is going to - be disappointed in him? No, it's deeper than that. Refuse to recognize him as the same person? (Even now, some voice in his hindbrain is babbling about how the other Leareth is probably going to kill him, though it'd be pretty surprising if he'd held off until now and changed his mind.)
But he's not sure how he would have felt, before, about another version of himself who had lost this much of his internal fabric. He's - not a very safe person. Most of the ways you could change a Leareth at random result in a monster. And it doesn't feel obvious that he could have the other Leareth explain it; if that worked, he could've kept it in his written notes, and then why would he have been so protective of his core memories in the first place?
( - a shattered tower - )
Deep breath. He’s still scared, but -
- realistically he’s probably scared because he’s in a situation he doesn’t control, without magic, without resources, mostly not even oriented to what’s happening, and two thousand years of hard-earned paranoia are screaming at him that when this happens he usually dies. Which is true, but surely it ought to make some difference that there’s another Leareth, right there, who is in control. (A Leareth he knows well, the person he was around 792, plus or minus some minor different experiences thanks to Bella existing.) And if he can’t trust his alt then things are kind of hopeless anyway.
He steels himself. “We should ask him about that.”
Leareth is bad at sorting through his memories because they're one, overwhelming with a lot of content he would prefer not to look at, and two, not at all organized on a larger scale by place or season or anything useful like that, and are full of choppy discontinuities between torture and hallucinations (some of which are also torture), so while the order is technically distinguishable, it still kind of feels like a jumble.
If Bella goes through, though, there'll be a pretty apparent shift in overall tone and feel, between memories of Melkor carefully iterating on various convincing scripts - leading up to the Gate - and everything after that, which is much more typical Utumno-type content.
And there it is.
He remembers noticing the diffuse wrongness - thinking that he'd sensed it before - but this time, when he finally had a moment of uninterrupted thought while resting after the Gate, successfully chasing it down.
Finding the discrepancies. Subtle, yet glaringly obvious as soon as he thought to look, checks that didn't add up anymore, the parts of his mind he needs to trust instead scrambled and trampled over.
Realizing that he's already lost. That it was over the instant Melkor brought him into Angband, and he was foolish to miss it for so long. (And the horror, not knowing how much damage he had already done to his own cause - had he killed Vanyel, killed Maitimo...)
He remembers opening a metaphorical door in his mind; the core of him, the place where his values live, driven deep into the fabric of each new body.
A tower. The stars. A promise to the world, to the future, not to give up–
He starts to get settled, before remembering that he'd meant to reply to Maitimo's message, except that sounds so, so hard right now, he would have to pick words in the right order... He's guessing that Bella needs his permission to tell people things about how he's doing, he can't remember if she explained that or not but it seems right. Anyway she has his permission, since writing a lot of messages to people sounds impossible but he also wants people to...know things...
He doesn't want her to tell anyone about his immortality method, but also she can ask the other Leareth about that too and right now the non-tortured Leareth is clearly in a better position to make thoughtful choices about infosec.
Probably she shouldn't talk to Fëanáro directly, Leareth has a sense that things go better when he learns information via Maitimo, and also he's not convinced Fëanáro wants or needs to know that many details about the inside of his head right now. But the older Vanyel in Arda, and Maitimo, are both - well, people he wants to have accurate information about him, to the extent it's relevant, because he sort of entrusted them with all of his plans.
(He continues to think she should not even consider it a confidentiality thing to talk to the other Leareth, they're the same person, even if he's occasionally weirdly scared that his alt is going to murder him.)
Leareth stands up, trying not to make any noise. :You know I would not ask you to spend more time here, helping him, than is sustainable for you, right? If you would prefer not to be taking so much of this on then we would figure something out. Although I do very much appreciate everything you are willing to do, here:
I don't even know how complicated it is yet, but it sounds like something I should be able to do, if I go slowly. Unfortunately I don't actually have, like, statistics on how likely subtle artists in general are to make mistakes under various conditions, because there was not a safe way to take data like that in Materia.
Imagine you had to lay a thousand grains of rice in a grid on a floor all pointing in the same direction. This isn't easy to do without making a mistake, but you'll notice most mistakes as soon as you make them before you place the next grain, and if you go slowly enough, and if you actually care enough about the grains of rice all pointing the way they're supposed to, you can do it. My favorite professor complimented me once about how I don't ever forget for a second that it's not grains of rice, it's a person. She said a lot of telepaths try to go faster because they can usually get away with it and that she couldn't even enforce being perfectly careful in class because most people would drop out if they got in hot water for being sloppy once, but I'm not sloppy. It's just that if I'm laying out a thousand grains of rice on the floor I have to acknowledge that's actually hard and not just promise I'm very careful.
:I can understand that: He looks thoughtful for a moment. :...I do not wish to keep you if you have work to return to, but - if you wanted to get a head start on thinking about the copying, you are welcome to look at my core memories today:
(There is a very faint note of anxiety in his mindvoice, on the last phrase, which is quite rare for local Leareth.)
:I do not endorse delaying this for my alt on the basis that I am slightly nervous! One moment, I think that I can dissolve that feeling now that I have remarked on it:
He is quiet for almost exactly sixty seconds.
:...All right, I am comfortable with it. I would prefer to be not standing in a halfway for it, though: This is still where they are. He glances around, points at a meeting room nearby. :Shall we?:
Leareth slips into the room ahead of her and sits. :I had already done most of the relevant thinking and unpacking my instinctive responses here, over the past six weeks: A brief smile. :Among various other reasons that I trust you with this: even if you were tempted to change anything, which I suspect you are just not, the change I would expect you to make is adding 'also mind control is bad', and you are not going to do so, because you think mind control is bad:
Then he can open an imaginary door in his mind, and hold the entry-point to what he calls his 'core memories' in his attention for her. He admits it's a slightly confusing way to refer to it, because it's not exactly a memory, even if he builds it out of the memories he manages to carry across between lifetimes. But, anyway, there it is.
- A sky full of stars - a tower silhouetted black against the horizon, majestic - lights in every window - the blazing determination and hope guiding every pair of hands that had worked to lay each brick -
It's an 1800-year-old memory and he's needed to work incredibly hard to keep dragging it across each incarnation. Also it feels very, very vulnerable, to know that Bella is looking at it, but Leareth has managed to unpack his emotions about that until it basically doesn't bother him, it's just something he can notice.
- never to walk away - to return again and again - no matter the cost - no matter how long it takes -
A relentless driving purpose. It's present in the background of all of his thoughts (and it's pretty noticeable, now, that this is true for him and not currently true of his alt), but fundamentally the source of it lives here. The part of Leareth that holds onto why it's worth it, to stay in the world, rebuilding again and again and again - paying irreversible costs, when he has to, because the alternative is failure, and this is the part of a Leareth that's unwilling to ever, ever give up.
(In his surface thoughts, there's a note of gratitude that Bella exists and showed up in his world, and told him of other worlds, because it means he might not have to pay the worst of those costs after all - and to the core values part of him, that's an unimaginably precious thing.)
Leareth nods.
"...I think I just realized why he is afraid I would kill him. He - must worry that I would not recognize him as still relevantly the same person, and he knows I would be concerned about that. He knows how intensely I try to maintain my integrity-of-self across time, because I am a dangerous person as it is - I have too much hubris to be safe - and, losing a piece of my values here and there could be incredibly bad for the world. And he might think that if I judged it too difficult or risky to repair, I would destroy him rather than risk him rebuilding it wrong."
He shakes his head. "That is not in fact how I feel - I want him to be okay, no matter how long it takes, and I think we can figure that out without undue risk - but I understand why he might think it, especially given how primed he is to be terrified of everything."
"...Hmm." Leareth thinks about it for a minute. "Well, I think that the current state of the world overall is unacceptable, and want to change it, which requires extremely large scale plans. I am literally trying to fight the gods. Successfully fighting gods requires ruthlessness. My plans have, and do, cause harm in the world, in the name of achieving various objectives. If I were wrong about the necessary objectives, or even just sloppy and incautious, then I would be walking around causing damage to no good ends."
"It really is." He looks thoughtful. "I suppose hubris is in some ways punished in this world, but - not because that is a law of reality, only because - well, the world's current equilibrium is stable partly because various Powers prefer it that way, and so if you try to change things then you are inconveniencing Them, and since They are powerful, they can do things such as make bridges collapse on you in unlikely ways or set you on fire. But, I do not think that is fundamentally different from, for example, human politics. And it is sometimes possible, if you are clever and persistent, to carry through changes even if initially a powerful nobility opposes them. I believe the situation with our gods is like that, just...harder."
"I recall I have sometimes had Nayoki put an agreed-upon compulsion on me, if I wished to keep some precommitment in a way that would less strain my self-control later on - I could theoretically do it on myself but doing compulsions on oneself is trickier. I am not sure if this is the sort of thing you would still be against?"
Your Leareth wanted me to update you. And Maitimo but Maitimo is conspicuously suspicious of me and that's not super fun - I assume you are also some amount suspicious of me but you don't, like, radiate it at me - so maybe you can just tell him how Leareth's doing for me.
He's pretty convinced he's out of Angband now. He's still, like, tired and traumatized and everything, but he believes he's not there any more. He has some damage to his core memories, self-inflicted when he realized he'd been tricked and needed a really lasting way to communicate that to himself, but I'm going to try to fix it with reference to the intact core memories of the local Leareth.
:Wow!: Vanyel absorbs that for a moment. :Is that why he stopped doing Gates, then? That's - honestly really impressive, catching it, I would've thought it'd be nearly impossible when Melkor could just erase his memory and try it over every time he got at all suspicious:
:Hmm, right: Pause. :I guess I should think about a message to send back to him, but I don't have anything off the top of my head. Anyway. I - was wondering if it'd be possible for me to speak to the local Leareth directly, at some point? I have some magic questions that are fiddly to convey otherwise:
(And it's hard to fake. Not hard enough to fake that they'll be willing to give the maybe helpful stranger any information about his location, but still.)
I've decided that even if the spell is technically perfect I need to add a section to make it more robust against worlds having duplicates. I don't think that's exactly what went wrong, since I didn't land in the corresponding place in your Valinor to where I was aiming in mine, but it seems a sensible precaution now I know that this comes up. I can't find a mistake in the spell, but that just means either I'm missing one or it's one of those spells with a chance of screwing up every now and then, those are a thing in Materia, and I hate this fact a whole lot.
:That's an obnoxious fact! Anyway, I think this is still an area where we'd like it if we could ask for your help, but - need some more assurance that you're who and what you say you are and are trustworthy, because there's a lot hanging on this. The offer to grab Ninquë is still open, if there's a way you can get around not having the interplanar version of the other-person teleport:
I actually think that in light of the untrustworthiness of the spell I should develop one of those anyway, because it means for multi-person travel one person can go first, and then call along anybody they want to bring with when they confirm they're in the right place, instead of needing to use several people's worth of mana on each trip like I wound up doing because I had Sayshen along. But I can loan local Leareth the earcuff tomorrow, if you want.
I wouldn't have exactly suggested in precisely this frame that if you wanted to borrow my ability to do telepathy stuff to anybody in five worlds as though at touch range just by knowing who they are you could let me read your mind but since you already did it I can acknowledge it really didn't hurt.
:Fair enough. I had not even considered that axis, to be clear - I mostly was thinking that it matters a great deal to me if you can help my alt be okay again, and showing you my mind seemed to be a prerequisite. Anyway, yes, I would like to borrow the earcuff and speak with Vanyel:
:It makes sense that you are surprised. She has demonstrated significant trustworthiness, and I find myself in a situation where the upside to trusting her is high. Also her powers mean that if I am to work with her at all, which I am kind of committed to since she rescued my alt from Angband and possesses the only means of contact with you, she could read my mind with or without my consent, so there is hardly much protection in refusing. Also, I expected that her having true information on me would lead her to cooperate more rather than less, which it did:
:Hmm:
(That really does convincingly sound like Leareth. Then again, Leareth is the one they should most expect that Melkor could pull off... He's not sure.)
He asks some questions about magic. Leareth continues to convincingly sound like himself. At one point, he says he needs thirty seconds to look something up.
Vanyel takes a deep breath. :Maitimo?:
...Wow.
:Most people are not like Vanyel, tragically. The Vanyel in my world is eighteen years old, and it is already quite apparent that he is exceptional. I can see why the other Leareth invested so many years and so much effort - and costly signs of good faith - in attempting to build trust with him. You met another me, you must have noticed that trust is not something I do easily:
Sigh. :Most people are not like me either, and - that might be a good thing, I am not sure:
I cannot think of anyone with your resources it would have been better to have land on us. Melkor had driven the factions of the Noldor to the brink of a civil war despite our repeated best efforts to mend bridges and it hadn't even occurred to us, that that was the sort of thing that might be enemy action, enough bad luck in the wrong places -
It took you about five minutes.
I think you are probably also well-placed to be sympathetic to our dilemma, here, with using the resources your world has to offer in our war. We are not so confident that Melkor could not imitate or listen in on your communications, and that you're not working for him, as to want to say anything about whether we expect to win the war without help, on what timeframe we expect to do that, how much or what kind of help we think we'd benefit from, and how badly we want it. Those are conditions under which I'd find it pretty annoying to be dedicating a lot of effort to those things we have asked about.
The thing Leareth is thinking is that he can absolutely see why his alt got along well with this person - enough that Maitimo was one of only two people he specified by name ought to receive updates, even though they hadn't known each other long at all.
:I understand perfectly and I would not wish you to be sharing any more than you have been. Also, Vanyel has said enough, in his requests, that I can make some guesses. You have a plan for which Vanyel's magic alone would suffice, and would be safer in a sense than asking our aid, which requires you to gamble on our trustworthiness. I would be very reluctant to take such a gamble, in your place! That being said, you also know that Melkor is aware of Velgarth magic, and can both detect and cancel it, and this downside would not be present with Bella's arcane magic. But you are, quite appropriately, still not willing to share any information that Melkor could use to win, if he had it, even if us having that information would allow us to help more, in the scenario where we were indeed on your side:
:I can see that, if your people had been on the brink of civil war and then Leareth walked in and within five minutes pointed out what was happening: Sigh. :It is irritating that this entire situation is so - low-probability. My alt was highly suspicious of it and I cannot blame him at all. But hopefully we can provide the demonstration of capabilities for you:
We'd be very grateful. We are already, really, the work our Leareth did in the early stages of the war made an enormous difference and the Noldor are eager to repay that debt -- though don't tell him that, I think it'd frighten him right now, to have anything at his fingertips that he would've wanted to use -
:Yes. I will not tell him now. Maybe someday you will be able to tell him yourself, at a better time:
(Leareth is thinking that he's kind of baffled by which things do and don't frighten Angband Leareth right now, but he leaves that alone.)
:Do you have any further questions?:
:It sounds as though he is recovering much faster than would be expected for your people, though it seems slow enough to me. He did some quite sophisticated reasoning to conclude he was not in Angband anymore, mostly from the fact that if Melkor had or could imitate Bella's mind-powers, he would have better things to do with it and the entire course of the war would have looked different: Sigh. :It took him weeks, because he is easily overwhelmed and very tired, but - that thought process is one I can recognize as my own, and gives me more hope that he will be all right eventually:
The damage is actually kind of complicated. A lot of the core memory structure is still there, but - smeared, or distorted, with the associated emotions shifted. This looks like it might be cumulative over time, actually, as though he had done the initial damage but then repeatedly disrupted it even more, mostly on occasions that Melkor tried erasing all of his other Arda memories in an attempt to undo whatever he'd done.
He thanks her for coming back, but mostly doesn't interact while she's looking.
He, in fact, can't feel it at all. Leareth resists the urge to keep checking his core memories, it seems like that might get in her way, and instead reads his book about gardening (he didn't even know the library had books about gardening, of all things), a sentence at a time with breaks in between.
He does his best to be relaxed about the fact that his mind is being altered (aaaaaa), and manages to level out at slightly tense but not panicked. It takes a lot of willpower, though. The book isn't great as a distraction because he's hitting the point of being too tired to process sentences.
He waits until they're out in the hall and the door is shut. "I spoke to Maitimo, after Vanyel. I think he is being entirely the correct level of paranoid about Melkor's ability to scheme against them - I think he learned it from my alt, actually - and, also, I suspect it may end up being very important, whether they decide they can trust us and therefore can use non-Velgarth magic which Melkor cannot interfere with as easily. My impression is not that it is extremely urgent, or that their chances of success drop precipitously the longer they wait on their plan, but - I think giving them the demonstration of your abilities that they requested would be highly valuable. I am not sure how costly this would be to you, of course."
When Leareth wakes up, alone with everyone gone, he doesn't feel a lot better, but something does feel different. It's a little easier to keep his train of thought pointed at something.
He gets up and walks around a bit, and notices that he's sort of vaguely dissatisfied with the room, and wonders why. He's really out of the habit of having preferences about his environment, much less doing anything to achieve them, but since he's not in Angband anymore, maybe it makes sense to change that.
The room isn't ugly by human standards, but he misses Tirion, and things being pretty the way Quendi make them in general. It's noticeably an infirmary room, even though the bed is a pretty comfortable one rather than the usual cot, and they brought in a desk for him; it's very impersonal. He would prefer a different room, he thinks.
What else does he have preferences about? He's still tired all the time and has trouble concentrating for long; he hates that. He should ask if Bella can do something about it. Maybe she can do something about nightmares so he gets more solid sleep - he thinks someone else might've mentioned that to him at some point but he can't remember now. (His memory is terrible right now, but he thinks it's mostly because he isn't paying attention to things, due to being exhausted.) There are probably other things he wants to be different, but that's a reasonable start.
The next time Bella is back, he has a list.
It shows up really clearly in Nayoki's Sight what Bella's doing, actually! Nayoki can bounce it to her when she's taking a break and it won't distract her. The degree of progress is a lot more evident.
It's less clear to Nayoki that she can help? It's a more precise level of detail work than she could do herself without, oh, another twenty years of refining her Sight and Gift-control just on that kind of thing, and Bella's not doing it to be temporary, so fixing it in place more isn't necessary. She can make the not-yet-fixed parts of Leareth's mind a bit more malleable, Mindhealing can do that without changing anything directly, but it's unclear if that'd make things easier or harder for Bella.
"It's coming along fine."
It's done after seven days of work on it and she calls Alt Vanyel to tell him she can summon Ninquë if they still want her to do that, with the caveat that she cannot guarantee Ninquë safe passage home again because of spell failure rates so it should wait till Angband is gone at least.
I know what conditions Quendi need but Ninquë will need to be all ready to go live in the woods if it turns out human towns here are not pretty enough, and I bet they're not. I can magic him a house which is confirmed habitable to Quendi but I can't magic him a no-decay effect or anything. Does he have a preferred location for me to teleport to - should I just talk to him or might I as well be talking to you because you're serving as his Velgarth geographer -
Then Leareth will meet his first Elf! He's taller than a human and very pretty and it's only a little obvious from his appearance but more obvious from his mind that he's not human. He is wearing absurdly nice formal clothes and has his hair braided even more elaborately than Bella's. He blinks at them. "Neat."
(Leareth reads the Elf's mind for about three seconds before catching that apparently they don't shield at all; he stops immediately, he feels very secure here and also it would upset Bella.)
"Welcome," he says politely. "Thank you for being willing to come in this fashion. Had you met the other me? That must be a little odd."
"It is so strange! I would like to help, obviously, but I fully understand the caution your people have shown. Are there any specific questions you have? I could ask my alt if he is willing to meet you, I am not sure if it is helpful to see both of us in one place and confirm there are definitely two."
"They haven't told me anything specific about what they're looking for but I am supposed to verify as much as I can without causing much inconvenience to your spell development process. - and to ask about whether there could be a spell to send me back, not because I need to go back, I can easily stay here for the rest of the war. but because I think it'd be - useful. For something. I'm sorry. Prince Nelyafinwë took it very hard, when Leareth was captured, and he's very paranoid these days."
"Right. I've got some progress on adding a section to be more careful about duplicate world instances but that can't be the entire problem because if the spell were just confused about which Arda I wanted, I should have landed in the south of Valinor in a random meadow where Rúmil and Fëanáro were waiting for me."
"And then you could select a destination not in Valinor, since we are aware of the Gate-block now - and fix the issue with duplicate worlds... That ought to be significantly safer, I think, though of course there are unknown unknowns." He looks at Bella again. "I wonder if our Vanyel would be up for meeting Ninquë - what do you think?"
He has a writing desk, which he spends about ten minutes a day at before flopping back in bed. Which is where he is now, it seems vaguely rude but thinking about that is hard.
The visitor looks vaguely familiar? Leareth probably met him, before, but it feels like a decade ago and it's hazy. He nods, keeps his expression neutral even though his heart rate is spiking for no reason.
Leareth calms down a little. The singing is - nice, he has a hard time noticing when something is actively pleasant as opposed to just not-bad, but this is.
Speaking out loud still feels like too much effort, and like there's some sort of barrier in the way. He can't Mindspeak but he can public-think for osanwë. What does he even have to say, though.
Is Vanyel all right?
I think so.
He hadn't realized how much one of the things he missed was Quendi singing. It's slightly nervewracking too, for unclear reasons - probably because it featured in the rescue hallucinations, actually. But he missed it.
Also he's so tired, and trying to look at the visitor's face or put his thoughts into words is making his head hurt. He turns away and burrows under his blanket again, it's not very socially graceful but it's hard to care. You can keep singing if you want.
It doesn't seem like there's a huge rush, so local Leareth hovers by the door as well for a while.
:I need to go work on some things: he says after fifteen minutes or so, apologetic. :I am not sure if you had other plans for after, you do not need to stay. He seems to appreciate your singing, though:
Then he will do that, very diligently, keeping the conversations somewhat impersonal because Prince Nelyafinwë mentioned that he should assume people would be reading even his private thoughts, here, but still getting enough to distinctly suggest that this is another Arda from earlier in its history.
When Ninquë is ready Bella can teleport him to some forest he picked out with alt-Vanyel's help and drop him off there and magic him up a bungalow unless he'd prefer to build his own house.
She resumes work on the spell with the information that she may have just bounced off Valinor and the magic needs to fail more gracefully when confused. And she sees Angband Leareth every day till -
- the last grain of rice is in place.
Angband Leareth's attention span has been gradually improving - probably related to having the core of his motivation system replaced - and it's started to feel very routine and almost not stressful at all. He's moved on to reading books on more interesting topics, given that his alt is no longer worried about it seeming hostile to give him activities which could plausibly help Melkor if he were somehow still in Angband.
(Even leaving aside everything else, if Melkor could have done what Bella's been doing, he would have done it right away and gotten his source of Velgarth magic back, which is another piece of conclusive evidence that Leareth doesn't exactly need at this point but still adds to a mental tally.)
He sets down his book (it's one about legal systems that that he wrote himself, millennia ago, back in the early history of the Eastern Empire.)
...He feels mostly like himself again, but also sort of - unmoored, somehow, like the centre of him doesn't quite fit with the rest anymore. Which makes sense. He's had a lot of life experiences since the person he was two decades ago.
"Thank you," he says, emphatically. "Should I try to do anything in particular, now?"
What does he normally do with his core memories? He doesn't think he spent most of his time looking at them.
"They feel the same as before, I think? I would not necessarily interact with them every day, before - I would..." It feels frustratingly hard to explain. "It is where most of my strong emotions live. But I would not have drawn on those in the day to day, just - for very significant decisions. And I think that much of my motivation comes from here. That part, I am not sure is entirely fixed yet? And...the core feels the same as it did before, but - somehow it is not quite right with the rest of me, it is difficult to describe how."
Leareth considers it for a while.
"Not really? I am unsure how to tell if I want to do something. I think it would be a good idea to review more of my personal records, but it sounds hard." Most of what he's done lately is read books, not very attentively, because at least it's better than being bored.
He is, for unclear and probably stupid reasons, REALLY SCARED at the prospect of leaving his room, which is confusing because he does already leave his room sometimes. Occasionally. Mostly it's when one of the Healers coaxes him to walk around, and it's often weirdly difficult and takes a few tries, but this is the first time in a while that he's run into it this sharply.
He can't figure out what's different, and in the meantime he can't move, even to go back to his bed and sit down, most of his brain is busy screaming that actions aren't safe, wanting isn't safe, trying isn't safe–
Leareth thinks back. "I was scared. About asking for a different room and about actually moving. That was - not very remarkable, at the time, my default state was being afraid of everything in my surroundings." It took several days for this room to feel as comfortable as the previous one, and it still doesn't feel safe, not completely, but nothing does and he's used to it.
He wants his magic back, he's not sure it's possible to feel secure without that, but he doesn't say it, since it's very reasonable of them to have his Gifts blocked, and having them unblocked would also be terrifying in its own right.
He doesn't know. Things happening? But it does seem like some kinds of events, like the staff here bringing him meals, are a lot less panic-inducing than this.
...Going somewhere in order to do something specific, maybe? If he imagines that he's just going to walk around the hall with his alt and come back, that feels easier, but instead they're planning to do something that's actually important, and when he thinks about that it feels like he just can't.
True. For a very long time it was the case that taking any action - being the sort of entity that even had goals or wanted to affected the world - was likely to make things worse rather than better according to what he cared about. Looking back, it was challenging to pull that off. It tugs so hard against, well, nearly everything that he is; Leareth is fundamentally a goal-oriented person. He had to point his mind in a very weird direction, aim all of himself at not doing things.
Probably it's not surprising that some of this stuck around? And that there would be a lot of fear in it, even though the association here isn't really 'and then he was tortured again' - he was additionally just scared of being tricked again.
Is it something Bella can help undo?
Nod.
He's calm now, but still kind of stuck, it would be so much easier to just say it was too hard and go back to bed for the rest of the day. But it seems very bad to let himself form a habit of giving up.
Maybe it'll help to make it feel as little as possible like a him-driven decision. He suspects it'll be easier once he's moving, but getting moving past the door is the hard part.
"Could you - take my hand, and walk with me?" he asks the other Leareth. It feels like kind of a weird thing to ask for, but when he pictures it, moving feels easier.
It's not not scary, but he's calm about it, and taking a step is easier when it feels like the path of least resistance rather than an active choice. And then he's in the hall, and nothing awful happens, and he seems to be mostly unstuck although still kind of shaken.
He doesn't try to interact at all while walking, though. He closes his eyes for parts of it.
And then they're in the library, and his alt guides him to a chair.
"I...think so...?" Mostly he's exhausted again - no, not quite that, more just overwhelmed. He almost feels dizzy, except not literally dizzy, it's hard to describe. "I think I need a minute."
He props his elbows on his knees and rests his forehead in his hands and tries to remind himself that he's here, in his own library - well, his alt's library - in one of the most secure research facilities in the north, if this isn't safe then nowhere is.
(It kind of feels like nowhere is.)
I currently have pulling people to my location worked out and I'm coming up on done with the patch to the one where the caster comes along but I don't have an interdimensional version of the send now. I can do it if I come along, is that okay or would you rather wait?
And now there's a much older Vanyel standing in her room. He's dressed like a Quendi; it suits him. His hair (unfortunately) isn't currently long enough to braid; it's also completely silver. He looks like he's been eating and sleeping well.
There is just-visible burn scarring on his wrists and the backs of his hands.
"You must be Bella," he says politely. "We're really grateful for your help."
"I can do that and the first teleport and then tap people, assuming we can expect to find people who will let me do a magic thing they've never heard of. I sometimes tap without asking since nobody around is using their mana but that's in, like, Healer's, where the thing I'm going to do with it is heal people, and with people who are aware that that's a thing I do and have said they're fine with it before, so I'd rather ask under these circumstances."
"Leareth's communication spell works, with some modification - I had to duplicate all his research on it, since I didn't even get to talk to him. It's more draining but I can get short messages across. I don't know if I could do that from here, though, or if it'd take more tinkering with the spell."
Angband Leareth is expecting them, and has relocated to the armchair by his bedside for the purpose of receiving visitors. He's looking forward to seeing the Vanyel he knows personally, even if for some reason he's anxious about it too.
However, for reasons that are opaque to him, his body's involuntary response to seeing Vanyel in the doorway is PANICPANICPANIC and becoming completely incapable of saying words.
Nod. He's distracted trying to figure out why Vanyel in person is terrifying, when the other Vanyel wasn't - well, it's hard for the other Vanyel to be scary, he's so young and clearly uncertain in himself, and this Vanyel looks a lot more like his main mental image of Vanyel, which is the way he appears in their dream.
Possibly it would help if he had spent almost any time going through all the recovered memories. He's mostly tried hard not to, on the grounds that they're either fake or very low-information-content torture and therefore don't actually contain useful data about the world, despite his mind thinking that they're VERY SALIENT.
He remembers Vanyel featuring in some of them, though, and also in some of his nightmares. It wouldn't actually help to tell Vanyel that he's scared of him because Melkor liked to give him hallucinations of Vanyel turning out to be evil, turning out to be Sauron in disguise, or just being very angry about him doing magic for Melkor and hurting him. Or...worse things. It's dumb because he knew it wasn't real, even if he was holding his mind in a state of it being impossible to know anything about reality.
Focus. He's been quiet long enough that Vanyel is probably feeling bad about having said something wrong, which he didn't. "I hope you and Maitimo are getting along. I thought you would."
He hadn't realized that; it seems really useful and he might use it more often now.
He and Vanyel can make another minute or two of very stilted conversation, and then Leareth is out of things to say, but doesn't want to tell Vanyel to go yet, on the grounds that practicing sitting here with Vanyel being polite and non-scary in the doorways is probably going to help their future interactions.
Angband Leareth still runs out of stamina for having people near him before Bella gets back. All he wants is to crawl back into bed and hide under the covers, which would probably give Vanyel a hint to leave but also seems really rude. However, he seems to be stuck on 'talking' again.
This is kind of a stupid thing to ask for help with, but: Bella can you tell me words to say if I want them to leave now.
Vanyel blinks, as though a little surprised, but nods. "Of course. You seem to be doing really well, I'm glad." Going by his conversations with Maitimo about this, it's impressive that Leareth is having social interactions at all. "Hopefully I can visit again in not too long."
He Mindspeaks his Savil immediately.
"All right, she's coming to meet us. How many people do you need to tap? She can take you somewhere with that many people, although I should warn you that no one except the Senior Circle is actually briefed on what you're doing here and why."
Savil shows up within a couple of minutes. She looks not much different from the Savil who Bella knows; her hair is a little thinner in its bun, the weathered creases at the corner of her eyes are a touch deeper, and she moves more slowly, but that's it.
"Welcome. Thank you for coming." She hands Vanyel a bag of some sort, then tosses up an illusion over them. "All right, this way."
Vanyel Gates to Urtho's Tower, which is a bit nervewracking because of the whole thing where he nearly died there, but they know the main room is safe. He uses the open door of the vacated Work Room, the one where the weapon that caused the Cataclysm lived.
He heads straight for the door where their chosen weapon lives, opens it, and starts casting shields over it; he doesn't think that carrying it through a Gate and then teleporting it will have any negative effects, but it's the sort of thing where you want rather more precautions than strictly necessary. The bag that Savil prepped for him has additional protections.
It takes him less than ten minutes to prep it and pack it up, and then he gathers his strength and Gates back, arriving very tired. It's a long way.
:Bella: he sends, leaning on the chapel door. :Ready to go:
"Oh good. - uh, I saw you, in some prophecies my set of Valar showed me back when we were on adequate terms, I didn't put it together at the time that the seven of you were his kids but I should've guessed when I found out he married Nerdanel since three of you were redheads -"
"I'm glad.
Can I meet your dad, and your brothers - or are they all really busy right now -
- my Fëanáro is staying in his Valinor for now because it would be a bad idea to spook the Valar while Rúmil's trying to figure out how to convince them that he heard from another universe that paroling Melkor doesn't work out and it was always a risky idea for me to go back there after being banished and -"
"Yeah, of course. I'll ask everyone to come over once they've got a minute free. I - can't imagine how I'd feel, if the Valar kicked me out - let's get a nice guest room while they all assemble themselves and then you can embarrass my father with stories of what he was like when he was - eight? Ten?"
I don't want everyone in the same room but we'll have her on the other side of the island and you can go get some sleep and I'll pull Tyelcormo and my father and the twins in, he says to Vanyel.
"Uh, when Fëanáro decided to run away to Endorë to grow up faster they restricted teleportation type spells. Also they broke all the necklaces I made that countered the thing where the passage of time doesn't feel important, except one, so I wound up sharing it with him."
"The Valar killed them. We think - after the war, once Melkor's dead, once they're not oathed - we'll be able to come up with something. Maybe a planet far away from here, if I were an orc I wouldn't want to live anywhere the Valar might decide was their jurisdiction - I'm a Quendi and I don't super want to live anywhere the Valar might decide was their jurisdiction -"
Other people file in, and Maitimo introduces them. "Pityo and Telvo are twins. My parents decided to see whether two babies could be conceived at once, like happens with some animals, and it turns out it works fine though it was sure a thing to test!"
"For the longest time we didn't know that part and it just felt so inexplicable how we'd - put together a very reasonable plan to mend bridges and talk things through and get to the bottom of whatever misunderstandings had caused so much hurt - and then it'd all fall through - I don't really have trouble believing it could've eventually led to wars and to oaths, though we weren't there yet. Do you happen to know when any of that happened -"
(He is mirroring his mental state to Macalaurë so they can notice if anything seems tampered with).
"That makes sense. I guess I'm mostly just morbidly curious if it was five more years of manipulations or fifty - but it doesn't matter. It didn't happen here, it's not going to happen here, and it's not going to happen in that Arda either. Thanks to an interdimensional visitor in both cases."
"Yeah. We worry he has spies here - or somewhere within Leareth's considerable Thoughtsensing range, which he might've been able to observe and then imitate - so we try not to get into details, even among one another, but it is not a secret what the aim is. The Valar haven't tried to rearrest him, so we'll have to kill him ourselves."
"Tirion is, at least to my eye," here's what it looks like to swoop down at someone holding aloft a snack from up high above the city, "though I guess adding it as an architectural consideration wouldn't hurt. You need to know some introductory wizardry before you can get to flying but I will be happy to teach it if your alt doesn't beat me to it."
It's still in Elfy flavor profiles. Afterwards she says, "I should probably get out of your way, unless you need me for anything else. - Rúmil isn't around, is he, it just occurred to me that he wouldn't have his eyes back - he'd be in Valinor and I probably shouldn't just sail into Valinor and show up at his friends' place and ask where he lives -"
:Reckon we can tell you more about the plan now, at least in person - I would've wanted to keep the details from your Leareth at least until pretty recently, but then you seemed very sure of him. Anyway, it got Melkor and all of his Maiar but it also got Olórin, who was channeling energy for it. We're hoping he's not permanently gone. But not sure yet. Also I guess we have some mundane injuries, there was some fighting with the orcs, and we have other rescued prisoners. If you wanted to come do some healing:
Vanyel isn't sure what the end of that sentence is. He waits. :I'm sorry: he sends finally. :He knew it was very risky - we did as much shielding as we could but still... We can tell you more once you come across. Um, I don't know if your teleport works if the last place you teleported to in Angband is now buried under rubble...?:
Yes, of course, he can do that, he keeps forgetting this is higher bandwidth than the communication-spell he's used to.
They're on a plain with some mountains in the distance, black smoke and ash in the sky above them, at the base of what now looks like an ancient crumbled fortress. The Noldor army is swarming toward the ruins of Angband.
:No, of course, I know: He makes an abortive attempt to stand up. :...I, er, can't really move, but if you bring me orcs I'll question them. I'm sure I haven't done that sort of thing as much as Leareth but I've done it some. And you can ask Bella about getting him here in person:
(Orcs who are presumably oathed to hate and never ever help Quendi, but Vanyel is visibly not Quendi.)
Ugh, this is kind of awful actually, but - he lays some coercive Truth Spells and starts asking about Maiar deployments, whether any Maiar who are often around in Angband weren't seen recently, whether they knew about offensives planned elsewhere - troops and weapons kept elsewhere - whether they observed any indirect signs of such, like supplies being moved around...
Orcs were expecting to die courageously and then be tortured forever by the Elf gods and they're confused and terrified and each have a different thousandth of the picture of the goings-on in Angband but after a while they can start to piece together a picture of which Maiar were active in working for Melkor (the Balrogs, Sauron, Thuringwethil) and what they were doing (preparing for the prophecied arrival of humans in the world, trying to figure out how Leareth got rescued, trying to figure out interworld Gates) and which orcs might know more.
Then he'll ask the Noldor bringing him orcs to find those particular orcs. He wishes he could say anything to reassure them, but he's not in charge here and doesn't know for sure that they're not just going to end up killed.
Is there any evidence of relevant Maiar having been outside of Angband today?
Then Leareth will help him up and support him along the way. After a few yards he ends up just carrying him. Vanyel isn't a large person.
After that's taken care of, it sure does sound like time to skim the surface thoughts of every orc within range. That's a lot of orcs but he can judge reasonably fast whether a given one has any idea what's going on, and probe for which authority figures they're thinking about, and then he can go looking for them and start narrowing it down.
...Okay, for one, why are there small children in Angband.
This seems like not really the point. Leareth can alert the Noldor of which orcs should not be allowed to leave, at least not until they've made sure there aren't any Maiar or major troop placements for them to flee to and start coordinating. He would like to question some of them more to find out the answer to that question.
Can they put the kids somewhere that might be less terrifying for them? He can tell the Noldor which orcs definitely don't know anything of importance and can be assigned as child-supervisors, and he can put up a mage-barrier around them and a spell to keep them warm since it's kind of chilly outside, and then he'll question the orcs who do know things.
All right, that seems conclusive enough for now, he'll un-mind-control them and ask the Noldor to hold onto them, keeping them in decent conditions if possible, they're already on the losing side of a war. Vanyel can Truth Spell them later about troop placements outside Angband, but he can now pretty confidently tell Maitimo there aren't any traps about to spring on them, and especially that there aren't any involving Maiar who know how to cancel Velgarth magic.
(Bella is, at some future point, going to be pretty angry with him about the mind control, which might end up being very inconvenient, but he'll take it over the world where they didn't check and Sauron surprise landed on their heads tonight.)
He doesn't know anything about Bella's opinions about mind control and doesn't actually know that there was to be any mind control though if he'd thought about it he could probably have guessed, he's mostly pretty busy coordinating people sweeping through Angband looking for prisoners -
There were some other prisoners, he tells Bella, do you have advice on best practices or anything.
Uh, if they want to work with me instead of taking their chances with Mandos, I can do quick temporary fixes for nightmares - Mindhealing can make that last longer - and prevent panic attacks, that one sticks, and pinch off trauma associations but that one scales up in time expenditure with how many there are. How many -
Well. As soon as it's convenient on your end. That goes for everything else you asked for, too, we don't have to be careful at this point and we're very much indebted to you personally and both Velgarths, and they have the people-dying problem, and we'd like to help out as much as we possibly can.
My father would say - has said - that the Valar were the sort of parents who'd coo over a baby but lose their temper as soon as their child got mobile enough to crawl into the workshop and eat the silk. And it's a good thing we're on our feet now and can move halfway across the world and, well, murder them, if we need to.
Yes. We talked through it in a lot of detail. We figured with enough worlds and enough magic systems we can - set it right eventually - but I don't think he was counting on that.
They're all - in the Void. So in principle it ought to be possible to pull them back out of the Void but we'd want to be very sure we didn't pull the wrong ones out.
It hasn't come naturally to us not explaining everything to everyone involved but Melkor found out about Velgarth, found out about our departure from Valinor, almost learned our planned arrival location and set up an ambush there, figured out where we were hiding in the caves and came there for Leareth - I couldn't afford to go 'well, I just don't know how to be as careful as he is', even though I really don't -
That would be more mollifying if Leareth himself didn't notice I existed, decide pretty promptly that he'd unilaterally offer to help me if I ran into trouble, follow through on that, and wind up telling me all his plans and cutting it out with the stuff that I objected to because my goodwill was more important!
Urtho built a lot of superweapons not used in causing the Cataclysm and Vanyel was able to access the part of his tower where they were stored. There was only one particularly suitable to taking down a Vala with no collateral damage and all of them are very dangerous so we'll probably keep being vague about how we did it in public, though Van doubts anyone other than him could get in. As far as we know Leareth didn't know about the tower or the fact it had superweapons in it, so that'll be news to yours too. Leareth was planning to make a god, we have mathematicians who study similar subjects and were inclined to ask for all his notes so we can verify that it's in fact a great idea and if it is he'll need help with a power source, his initial plan was very awful. Vanyel's Gate problem is mostly psychosomatic. Karse invades Valdemar in a couple of years in your timeline and we should get them to not do that.
"- if you hadn't helped we were going to go ahead with it anyway, we were just going to have Vanyel Gate directly. And - if for some reason the Noldor had been run by some terrifically irresponsible people who hadn't told me it was dangerous, I think it would've been right to help them too, really, if you could, because irresponsibility is much easier to fix than Melkor. - also I could have inferred for myself that it was dangerous. It was being the magical core and power source for a weapon meant to destroy Melkor."
He looks her in the eye. :Maitimo asked me to confirm, urgently, whether any of Melkor's Maiar were outside Angband at the time of the attack, or whether there were contingency plans in case of Angband's destruction that might spring on us now. From what I had heard of Melkor, these seemed not unlikely as precautions he would take. Vanyel had questioned some orcs under Truth Spell and not gotten very far, he had obtained some names for their leadership but there are many thousands of them and the Noldor could not find them instantly. So - I read a number of orcs with Thoughtsensing, in order to find their leadership before they had a chance to slip away. They were, in fact, making plans to do so and might have succeeded. Vanyel was asleep and not available to Truth Spell them, so I used a compulsion to imitate Truth Spell, briefly, it was for about a minute. I removed them immediately once I had learned what I needed, which is that all his Maia were onsite and there are no traps hanging over our heads; there is a great deal more to tidy up but it is not urgent and can wait for Vanyel. I feel that the leadership of a place such as Angband are more legitimate military targets for a coercive interrogation than most:
He ducks his head. :Nonetheless, I expect you to be angry. It would be reasonable on your part. That is a cost I accepted when I chose this, including the part where you may not wish to give me rides to strange worlds anymore. I decided I preferred it to the risk of, for example, us failing to check in time and Sauron landing on Vanyel's head while he is too tired to fight. However, I will not try to evade paying that price, so, go ahead and shout at me if you wish:
I'm not going to shout at you. I'm just going to be exasperated. With a list of Maiar and the earcuff I could have checked for them even if they were a thousand miles away.
The orcs are under oaths, every one of them old enough to talk. I don't know exactly how the ones that wind up in leadership positions are selected but it's entirely plausible to me that they're effectively innocent victims.
:...Can you do that? I think I am still calibrating to your earcuff's capabilities. Although obtaining the full list of involved Maiar in the first place was much of the work - if you can in fact search for them, you should check anyway, Melkor managed to capture my alt so I am really not sure it is possible to be too careful here. How do oaths work?:
You should probably ask a Quendi. It was irresponsible of them not to explain before having you do anything with the orcs, actually, I don't think it can have been reasonably assumed that you wouldn't fuck one up irretrievably if you contradicted an oath with a compulsion.
Give me the list and I'll see if they're reachable by earcuff or not. I think it's not hard to derive from what you know about it! It searches for a person I specify and then closes telepathic distance! If they don't exist, it doesn't put me in range of anyone, and if it does, I can tell they're there!
:That is fair enough. I have not fully updated on your help being an available resource, and so it did not occur to me when I was rushed and had mentally marked you as busy with healing:
He can get her out the list.
:Is there anything else your earcuff can do to help us locate anyone whose names we do not know, if we are searching for troop placements and such? I assume Maitimo knows where all of the Noldor troops are supposed to be, but we have not yet obtained anything like complete information on Melkor's deployments:
:I think we have at least some names for soldiers who were not onsite, I will have that collected and passed on to you if you are willing to help locate them. Also, do you know why there were so many small orc children? Nobody has actually explained it to me, I was very startled - that reminds me, I ought check in and see if the Noldor I asked set up a more pleasant area for them while we figure out what to do there:
:I was not expecting the ratio of children to adults to be so high! Also I was not expecting the children to be raised in the torture prison! Do they not have other cities...: Sigh. :You know, on reflection, Angband may well have been the safest and most fortified place for an orc to raise a family recently. I was surprised but I could probably have predicted the small children if I had thought through everything, though there are really an overwhelming number of them:
I moved to Tol Eressëa to get away from the time slide till I had a countermeasure, and found that living on a platform up a tree was not for me. The spell I was imitating actually does an extradimensional space in a house shape with servitor spirit things and food but mine just does a house.
You mean besides how you decided to reduce my concerns about mind control to whether or not I would yell at you and risked the sanity of some number of orcs by fucking around with their already thoroughly ill-treated psyches not even knowing what oaths are? Or the thing where I was enlisted in a plan that could have killed an alt of my friend without my knowledge and only didn't because someone as an afterthought decided to mention to me that he might be retrievable? Or the thing where Melkor is also similarly retrievable? Or the thing where there are copies of all my friends around but they haven't known me for the last twenty years and don't especially have any reason to like me except insofar as I can do them magical favors, but my actual friends have to stay where they are to avoid startling anyone until the stupid, stupid Valar have been gently convinced not to replicate the entire tragedy that played out here? No, apart from that I'm having a great week.
He looks down.
:I am sorry. For all of it, but - in particular, I think I am not a very good ally. It did not occur to me at all to ask you, because on some level my mind does not see you as someone who would offer help if I asked. And... I am not the one who has the most context here, but I think you should have been told the plan - not at first, since I cannot fault their earcuff security concerns given their priors, but at least when you brought Vanyel to our Velgarth. You could have spoken behind my shields; I would have considered that more than sufficient precautions. Of course, the fact that I know your trustworthiness with information makes that an easier call for me:
The extremely powerful extradimensional people are glaring at each other and - he actually doesn't want to deal with it, it's not his Leareth, people are still dying in the fight to clear Angband and make sure they have all the prisoners out, but -
Is everything all right? he asks both of them.
We are discussing various things, like whether I should magic up a lot of cute little bungalows to put orcs and such in, and if it was responsible to use compulsions on orcs under oath to get them to do things likely contrary to those oaths even if you think compulsions are under normal circumstances unobjectionable. I don't think it's time-sensitive if there's people waiting for me in the infirmary.
- they're not under oaths, Melkor's dead. That happens to be safe even when they're under oaths for the same reason you can't swear to be able to fly, but it's not in this case relevant. I think orcs might object to cute little bungalows because of the "cute" part, they seem to dislike Quendi architecture as much as we dislike theirs.
- the oaths go away when the Ainu they're sworn to dies? How could you possibly know that in advance, who else died? The bungalows can look like whatever if you want to hunt up an orc architect. They do have to be one story tall, though, I didn't spend long enough on the spell to get it to do stairs. I'd need a Maia to do a lot of them.
Aulë mentioned he thought that was how it would work Years ago, and then it was very noticeable when it happened, the orcs all reacted at the same instant all across the battlefield and throughout Angband. I can try to get someone to describe how the bungalows should look.
After she seems done, Leareth turns to Maitimo. :I realize you were very busy and cannot really fault you for putting off explanations - and you might still be in which case it is not urgent - but, what are oaths and how do they work? Bella made them sound so incredibly appalling:
Quendi and orcs - which are descended from us - can by declaring out loud that we're doing so and naming a Vala or Eru in witness, make binding commitments which only they or their death can release us from. This works, though less well, if we are confused or misled about the words we're saying. Melkor used it to make the orcs swear to obey him and hate Elves, and various other things, there was a little bit of orc-to-orc variation. You could see oaths with mage-sight, but wouldn't have seen any because they're all gone now. Being physically unable to follow through on an oath means it has no effects on you so compulsions don't interact poorly with them.
I feel quite strongly that you should never ever try using your magic to get someone to swear to something in ours but if you think you might want to I have various advice in the spirit of harm reduction. Following it would not mean I would forgive you about it.
The effects if you are misled about what they mean are complicated and weaker - and this is not a subject where we have conducted much study, for obvious reasons - but what Melkor did is have the orcs swear as small children and then again regularly, so it gets stickier over time.
Nod. :I am, empirically, someone who is very comfortable with mind control and even I find that disturbing. I am glad that Melkor's death reversed it, at least:
Sigh. :...By the way, Bella is in possession of an artifact which allows her to close telepathic distance with anyone no matter the distance, and can use it to locate people who have been specified to her, including Ainur. She is annoyed with me for using compulsions because she could have tried to locate surviving Maiar under Melkor that way. I think we ought ask her to check anyway, though she should probably test it first with Olórin to confirm it does not give away her presence to them; she can check humans that way without their awareness but Ainur may be different:
When we asked you for help we didn't have a list of them. Also much of the scenario we're worried about is that they managed to figure out how to move between worlds on their own, or that they returned to wherever Melkor got Ungoliant from, and if they did we might not know of the world where they are. That said, if she tests with Olórin and the test isn't detectable we would absolutely appreciate it if she'd go ahead and check for them, here and for that matter in the other Arda and both Velgarths; the safer the better.
:I know, and I did say that to her. Her earcuff can also cross worlds, although I am not sure if it can find them in any unspecified world. I am at this point moderately certain Melkor did not have a way of crossing worlds, unless it was one not known to any orcs and also not apparent in any of their strategic planning that orc commanders were aware of; it also does not seem that any major Maiar were involved at one point and then disappeared. Unfortunately we cannot ask Melkor anymore:
:We are talking about a god who managed to capture a version of me, so I am really not sure it is possible to do too many checks here:
He looks Maitimo in the eye. :I know this is a very complicated situation to be handling, and it is apparent you are doing most of said handling. I am sure we have made some mistakes in coordination, given the operational security before this and resulting knowledge gaps for various people, but - I think you are doing well. I will stop distracting you now unless you need help with something specific:
It's really useful! I do personally find that it makes it almost intolerable to be alone and not doing anything terribly interesting but that might be a problem specific to me. Give us a month and we can have a couple more of them and get started on repaying you for - everything.
"Will the same thing work again? If I grab him here and you're ready and I can just fetch you out of the Void again? - suddenly assassinating one of Aulë's ostensible Maiar will not endear them to me and my warnings from another universe at all. Was he even doing anything bad yet -"
Will I be able to bring you over soon? I miss you. I haven't even tried talking to the you here - he moved south when Melkor was paroled, I don't want to scare him - wouldn't be the same anyway, I am getting really sick of there being copies of my friends except they haven't known me for twenty years.
Killing him might not be irreversible, actually? Uh, if we do it the same way as we just did here, which obviously needs to be less reversible for some people but does at least work for the time being. They had a thing from a Velgarth that sucked all the Ainur around into the Void and they had Olórin deploy it but I got him back out.
:Does he have a way of knowing that- I suppose yes, you told the Valar we were killing Melkor. Does he have a way of knowing the specific mechanism of the weapon, yet, because if not we should absolutely keep that a secret from everyone in the other Arda, and if so we have a very urgent problem, depending on how long spell development works:
No, they weren't told we were killing him. They were told that in another Arda paroling him led to him fomenting conflict within Valinor before running off to start a new torture fortress but I didn't update them on war footing intel. It could still startle Mairon into doing something but not quite that much.
:I think we should keep recent news well secured - if the only path to communication between the worlds is you, that ought to be easier, but I think you should make sure that any Quendi you told over there are on the same page about maintaining operational security:
Pause. :I am not sure if you have a feasible spying route to discover whether he has been researching inter-world transit already? He might have been, since he knew of their existence already:
Fëanáro has an earcuff like mine. I guess maybe he should break the enchantment on it. It's possible he's been researching it if he wanted to go to Materia but until recently it and its allied planes would be the only other worlds he'd have heard of, and all of them prohibit science, and spell development is much harder if you can't do science even if we assume he can otherwise unproblematically come and go.
:I am somewhat worried about your Fëanáro having an earcuff and also being in the same world as Sauron, well, Mairon, even it it is not that likely he would attempt to steal it or that your Fëanáro would break secrecy if specifically asked not to. Also I think there is a significant difference between 'if we have an information leak, Sauron can immediately turn up here' versus 'will begin urgent spell research', even if he is faster it would presumably still take him days if not weeks? That is why it would be valuable to know if he has already created such a spell, though I am not sure there is a route to finding this out without, for example, kidnapping Mairon:
Since Maiar can't sense me when I'm shielding I can check on him. That doesn't tell me where he physically is unless he's leaving a sense public but he might not bother to privatize them if he's in another world where no one has osanwë anyway, it's worth a look, I think.
:If you can shield entirely against osanwë then it makes sense on principle. I think it would not be safe if, for example, Fëanáro uses this method to check for my presence, since osanwë cannot make someone invisible to Thoughtsensing, and I have my Othersenses passively open most of the time because I am very paranoid:
:He could also be relaxing at the moment because he already has the ability to worldhop and has no other urgent projects yet, but I do find this somewhat reassuring. Can you at least tell if the person you are contacting is in the same world as you or not? I am not sure if there is any way to get you to the other Arda to check, but it might be worth considering:
He can just give her his shield-talisman against both magical detection and attacks, since he's right now on territory held by an allied army and can make his own shields on the spot anyway.
:Which Maia are you going with? I can shield them too; I am not sure if Maiar are magically detectable to each other but they are extremely visible to mage-sight:
Well, whenever Olórin has been asked and is ready (if he agrees), then Leareth can weave some Velgarth-style shields over him. It's kind of labour intensive to completely shield his strong magical signature against mage-sight, and Leareth can't even be sure that it's the right kind of shielding to hide from another Maia, but it seems much better than not doing it.
:All right. Bella, please be very, very careful, and if–:
He stops for a moment. Thinks. :I think the risk here is very small. Nonetheless, there are still unknown unknowns, and it is rather all or nothing since you are the only one here with an earcuff or the ability to teleport, so I am not even sure how we would attempt a rescue mission if you did not return in the expected interval. Possibly Vanyel could Gate across if you shared a memory of a place only present in that Arda - your house, for example? I do not actually have the inter-world Gate technique, yet; my alt does, but for many reasons we ought not ask him to go rescue you:
Should be a solid sense-impression to Gate off, in the unlikely event he has to attempt it; he's absolutely not going to Gate to the other Arda unless it's a genuine emergency, the Valar really don't need additional magical visitors to alarm them even more.
:That tapestry is adorable, by the way: he tells Bella.
Leareth is a some more reassured.
:I think we ought be somewhat concerned that he now knows of the existence of other Ardas, since the Valar do, and that he will try to find this one and perhaps aid Melkor in the war. Probably the best thing to be done, here, is to remain on guard. Oh, and one good thing is that this Sauron will know very little about Velgarth magic, even if he has arcane magic, so he almost certainly cannot cancel it: Yet.
:I wish there were a way to test if it is similar! ...I suppose the other Valar here can also cancel Velgarth magic, since they blocked Gating, but given their track record I am not very eager to involve them in our research or strategy planning. Also the fact that there are gods, but it is possible I am unfairly prejudiced against gods due to the Velgarth ones specifically being the way they are:
Without even a little help from at least one Vala I'm not sure how to safely get Mairon Voided. I can only summon him to me, not to a different place; once he was physically nearby he'd have a short window before Olórin could do anything or I could teleport out. Maybe we could ask an Aulë if there's anything he could do without being there himself to also get Voided; Mairon ostensibly works for Aulë, who also voted against banishing me.
Leareth talks to Vanyel, who's fully awake now though still very low on reserves, and ends up carrying him out to look at the weapon (now on the ground with a wide perimeter marked around it, and wards, so the Noldor troops stay clear).
:We are fairly sure it is one time use: he tells Bella. :I suppose you need make a trip to our Velgarth for a duplicate. We probably should not wait until Vanyel is rested enough to Gate, and I am not sure he feels like giving me the ability to Gate to a number of superweapons, although I am definitely not going to steal them. He could perhaps share his memory of the place with you, if that would be sufficient for the teleport? He also had a shielded bag for transporting it, although he reports that the weapon was stable and there should not have been any problem even if it were unshielded:
:It would if you were a Velgarth mage! I have no idea what sort of magical senses you have, if any. Get out right away if anything weird happens? The weapon shouldn't even be possible to activate without a Maia helping, since Olórin's part here was being the core and energy-channel, the design is incomplete. It's the only weapon in that room; if it looks different than the cube-maze, you got the wrong room somehow, don't take a weapon unless it's identical. I visited the one in my world later, but I can't see how fifteen years earlier could have any other hazards, the place has been buried for eighteen hundred years:
She lands in a beautiful stone room; a floor of polished white marble with an eight-pointed compass rose design inlaid in the centre in veined-pink granite. Curving white stone walls rising in a conical shape, a peak two storeys above her head, lit by a magic light hanging form a silver chain
Laid in the centre of the floor design is an identical copy of the weird metallic cube-sculpture weapon.
Bunch of evil Ainur are gone now. As soon as I turned Leareth loose he started mind-controlling people because the downside in his mind amounted to a chance I would yell at him, but as far as I know he - through no particular caution of his own - did no permanent harm.
Everyone's mad now. Imagine if they had been this mad when the Valar exiled you for no reason! That would have been a reasonable thing to be this mad about!
Rúmil says we're leaving. My father says that I must promise to stay in the other Arda and not go anywhere else but I think it is actually not true that I must promise this. I will promise it at least for a little while if there's nowhere else more interesting we're planning to go.
Maitimo wants to ask about Leareth again but he just asked about Leareth and the answer almost definitely hasn't changed. It'll be a long time before he's all right but he will be all right. Maitimo will have to live with that.
Once things have died down a little bit he does invite Bella and Rúmil and the functional Leareth and Vanyel ("should we also invite younger Vanyel?") to debrief on everything and make sure all known tragedies in the earlier-in-history Velgarth are averted and compare magic systems again without anyone keeping secrets for war-related reasons.
Vanyel would lean against inviting his younger alt, unless Bella disagrees; they can talk over the earcuff or he can visit the other Velgarth and catch him up later, and from what he remembers of being eighteen, a long meeting with this many people would be incredibly draining.
It will probably go over best for older Vanyel to go deliver advice to the earlier Valdemar anyway. "How complicated is it to prevent the war with Karse, is that just a matter of forewarning people that it's a terrible idea or are we going to want to have a big army visibly hanging around glaring -
- maybe Lórien will make Elspeth immortal, if you think that's a good idea -"
"It's not at all as simple as warning people, it– hmm. There were political tensions there for decades, I don't fully understand the rationale within Karse. But I do think that if we were more obviously prepared, they would leave it alone even if Elspeth died. Making her immortal would be...several additional layers of complication, politically speaking, but if Lórien were just willing to heal any ailments she has and slow aging a bit, twenty years instead of five would make a huge difference and it wouldn't be totally implausible for a normal human lifespan. If Lórien is willing to do it for Elspeth, I think we ought to ask for Queen's Own Lancir as well, he died a few months before her and it was very hard on her. Also on me, I guess, er, younger me."
"His original Companion. She's my friend, I was bringing her along before I had the spell failure problem and when I go back to Haven to grab my stuff and say goodbye again I'll pick her up. I don't know exactly how coordinated Companion deaths work but if a lot of Companions were hanging around being immortal because a Groveborn stole their human I think I might have heard about this, so..."
"Lórien can maybe do something about broken - all the kinds of death-link things you have in your world. Not getting them to go away but making them much less impossible to work around." Apologetic glance at Vanyel. "I asked him but he wasn't sure and so I figured it was better to not even mention it until Melkor was dead."
Vanyel is still trying to think of an answer to the first bit, which is mostly that he really should have thought of that but didn't and also now he's thinking of poor Tran and Delian, and– and then the second part catches up with him and he freezes, unable to speak at all.
Vanyel takes a deep breath and wrestles his attention back to the moment. "Right, we were talking about history in the other Velgarth. Er, Darvi - that's Elspeth's son, the heir - falls down some stairs and dies in 795. Not sure how to avoid it on purpose, it was kind of a freak accident, but. Er, I end up redoing the Web significantly, we should probably do that even sooner as a deterrent to Karse - I could go do it now, in fact. However, we shouldn't redo the vrondi because we think that gave us issues with a lack of mage-gifted trainees. Hmm. King Randale, who takes the throne after Elspeth, ends up with a serious chronic illness. There's a child at Bardic, Stefen, who can painblock for him, but I assume he's not at Bardic yet since he was, hmm, probably about one year old in 792. Hopefully we can figure something else out sooner, though."
"Oh, good. We should get my Velgarth's Randi over as soon as possible, then. What else... A lot of drama related to me being a stupid idiot and keeping the conversations with Leareth quiet for fifteen yea–" He stops. "On the advice of the Groveborn, Yfandes is reminding me, so not completely stupid. It sounds like the other Velgarth already addressed that, which avoids a lot of issues."
"Your world has people dying constantly and dozens of gods making it unsafe to operate in! I can't evaluate any of the details of the plan, maybe when you give it to the Quendi who can they'll say it doesn't work, but if they think it will, then we should figure out how to do it."
Vanyel glances between them. "Anyway. There's also Lineas. Leareth, the family-murdering blood magic dagger plan was bad for multiple reasons, but one of them is that Highjorune is over a Heartstone tied to a spell that's stabilizing an earthquake fault and using the power destabilizes it. We nearly found this out the hard way. I assume the dagger's already there, since we thought it dated to Ylyna's marriage, but it should stop being there."
Leareth's eyes narrow. "Oh. I see. ...In actual fact, it is no longer there, because," he looks over at Bella, "once I found out there were other worlds of magic, achieving the plan at all via invading Valdemar no longer seemed like a good tradeoff, the only reason for the Lineas plot was to secure an alliance with a kingdom neighbouring yours, and Vedric Mavelan is not exactly a trustworthy ally so instructing him not to use it would be a lost cause."
"Okay. I guess the next thing to summarize is what happened in our world. Leareth arrived when doing an experimental Gate of some kind, landed on some squash farmers outside Tirion, heard from them that our succession dispute had escalated to sword-carrying and came to the palace to see if he could do anything. I told him that we'd hoped to deescalate, but failed, so far. I did not tell him that we'd tried a dozen things that should have worked and they'd all been fatally undermined in some impossible way, that it was like we were playing a rigged game, because in my experience complaints to this effect just reflect badly on the people making them. But, uh, he was reading my mind, and he said immediately that we had an evil god trying to drive us into a civil war and he might be able to help. He did protective amulets and confiscated everyone's swords and investigated an attempted arson Melkor had arranged to spark a fight and spoke to the Valar about the situation and then Gated us out. Melkor attacked while we were departing, and then we were ambushed on the other side. We managed to escape to a cave system nearby, where we arranged to transport the rest of the Noldor over and where Leareth began trying to reestablish communications with Velgarth so he could ask for Vanyel's help."
And meanwhile:
:Oh. I apologize for my alt reading your mind: Leareth is telling Maitimo privately. :I know why he would have: for one, that Leareth had never met Bella, :and it may, in fact, have been the difference between him succeeding and failing to address your problem, but nonetheless:
He touches his amulet; without context it looks like an almost absentminded gesture. When given better options you take them.
"Leareth was captured by Melkor when he Gated Vanyel and Yfandes in from Velgarth. We think in hindsight that Melkor was able to spy through some of the orcs taken prisoner during the war, and then get close enough he could detect and respond to the Gate. At that point we fled, first to Tumunzahar - a Dwarf city east of here - and then to Valinor. Melkor manipulated Leareth into doing some Gates for him. It sounds like from talking to orcs the aim was to figure out how to do them himself, but he didn't achieve that, or to piggyback on ours, but he didn't have a chance to succeed at that either."
Vanyel blinks, nods. "Anyway, through what in hindsight was probably some divine coincidence, we ended up finding these magical tapestry records in Kata'shin'a'in, the trade city of the Shin'a'in people – they're a sister people to the Tayledras, they guard the Dhorisha Plains. And we were allowed in to see them, and learned more about the Mage Wars, and...then Dara, she ends up being King's Own much later and was travelling with me, got a Foresight vision that led us to the buried remains of Urtho's Tower. It turned out I could use Farsight to Gate in, for some reason the Star-Eyed gave us permission to do it, and we went in and found some of Urtho's old journals and translated them. Also found the fifteen other superweapons he had built and stored in his basement without telling anyone."
Leareth's eyes widen slightly. "Urtho's writings survived? ...Honestly, building over a dozen superweapons just to see if they would work sounds very characteristic of him. I had no idea but perhaps I ought have guessed. It would explain why the Shin'a'in people were so adamant about guarding the Plains. The Goddess would not have wished for me to ever find those remains."
"Next up, humans. The orcs think that there are going to be some native to Arda soon. I don't know what Eru is thinking but I'm worried that if they wake up beside Cuivienen or something like we did they're going to have a bad time of it, they're more fragile. Does anyone have a good way to notice the sudden appearance of a new species at an unknown location anywhere on this planet. Ideally something we can check regularly."
"Setting passive wards? Or, hmm, something like the Web would be able to sense that and tell us." He looks back to Maitimo. "Sorry, the Web is a sort of ward system over all of Valdemar. Our first King made it, possibly with the help of some gods, so I'm not sure I can replicate anything like it even with Leareth's help, but I think we could probably build something that will sense any really large change to the number of living creatures in an area, and is less time-consuming than scrying the entire continent every day."
"We would really appreciate it. I'm also inclined to ask some combination of you all for help governing them, once they exist? They're welcome to live in Vinyamar but I assume they'll be different from Quendi in what they need and what laws make sense for them to have. And we're not, for example, set up for people with less than twenty years of experience at a craft to be net contributors to their society."
"I have my notes now so I can actually answer that in something resembling good order!" Text swirls into place on her crystal ball. "Let's see. I think people from Velgarth aren't going to have my probably-plane-specific attitude about gods and royalty and so on being very scary, though they might have it at all, especially people from outside of Valdemar - the Valdemaran royal situation rhymes with yours way better than some standard issue human king whose ancestors stabbed more people than any other contenders. Uh, you'll probably have people hitting on Quendi if you invite enough folks through, probably tell them anyone under age fifty is effectively a child so they're not disappointed nobody likes them back. Also the sex-is-marriage thing in case anyone does fall for some well-preserved middle-aged human. Speaking of which you might need to decide on a policy, and the applicability to humans of that policy, on whether you want to back Mandos's insistence on everybody being straight? In my Valinor I gave a passive-aggressive lecture about that but didn't really push on it much before I was shown the door so I don't know how sticky it is in the general population."
"I think probably if I ask my father his opinion will be that the Valar are idiots. Visitors should be forewarned anyway, though, because it's not - entirely something we can make decrees about - I would actually expect that Quendi will fall in love with humans a fair bit though they make take their time saying so."
"Moryo's talking with the Dwarves about it. We were planning to ration everything centrally for the next decade or so until we're back up to having enough of it that it doesn't matter how sensibly it's allocated and they passionately hate that plan and think we should introduce money instead and I promised I'd hear them out after the war. If you have thoughts one way or the other we've only ever been exposed to the one thing..."
"I liked the gift economy but it might not make sense under different conditions. Money's okay in ordinary situations but it - limits you to ordinary situations, in a way, the paradigmatic case of a family that all gets along and has a person or two with a productive job and doesn't require anything exceptionally expensive, it makes doing anything that isn't that risky and scary."
"If we actually expect resources to no longer be particularly limited in a decade then it is less clear. Although even in an economy that runs on money, I think that once there are sufficiently abundant resources in general, it will probably drift toward being less limiting in that way. We could also discuss setups in between the two, with a monetary economy and also some centrally allocated resources to aid people who are unable to do sufficient productive work to support themselves. I have a number of books on this subject. If the dwarves passionately hate the centralized plan, it seems difficult to get them on board with it at all, and they are the people with the highest technological level on this continent, no?"
"They'll still sell us things if we're not using money internally, they just think it'd be stupid of us. I think it matters a lot whether things will be different in a decade. Certainly in the long run it would be pretty intolerable to have material scarcity but right now - there are planets full of people just dying, it might make sense to do whatever's most efficient until we can fix it. That seems likelier to be true if we can fix it in, say, a couple of decades or a century on the outer end, I don't think it's sustainable to compromise quality of life in Vinyamar for centuries even to help people elsewhere."
Vanyel nods. "Are you going to have trade relations with Velgarth - er, considering both Velgarths, I guess. Most of Velgarth does use money, and - honestly, given the actual level of organization and centralization we have in Valdemar, trading goods for money is going to be easier to implement than the way things were in Valinor."
"I would have thought Valdemar was pretty safe! But, well, given the whole Iftel thing..." It's weird, he keeps half-forgetting about the whole Iftel thing - presumably that's the anti-curiosity magic. "I think that'd be a good idea, if Leareth is willing–" He cuts off. "We should check in with Leareth's organization in my Velgarth. One assumes he won't be personally leading things over there for a while, but I think the northern area is probably still safer than Valdemar proper?"
"Now that things are somewhat less of an emergency - and we have less need for operational security - I think I ought to probably visit the other Velgarth and make sure everything is going smoothly. If Bella is willing to offer transport between the two every so often, I could straightforwardly run both for a few years."
"I know an interplanar Gate too? I spent months re-engineering the spell, it's how I was originally going to get the weapon. Just a lot less safe since we knew Melkor could detect and cancel Velgarth magic, and would be especially knowledgeable about Gates..." He frowns at Bella. "I think I missed something. What are you not thrilled about? It sounded like Leareth got everything sorted a lot better than I was managing on my own."
"...Did you have a better solution? I was second-stage Truth Spell-ing them and I was still having a hard time - mostly with getting the orcs who even knew the full list of Maiar working for Melkor, much less where the stupid troops placements are, we still don't know that and I'm really hoping it doesn't explode in our faces."
"Leareth didn't know oaths existed. The Quendi he was taking cues from had more information, but I think that's a symptom of not performing due diligence. I don't know exactly how much he did or how invasive it was but it's at least very plausible I could have come up with something better, especially from his state of information. I did have a supplement to what he did, as it happened, which he only knew about because he came clean expecting me to yell at him."
"Oaths are visible to mage-sight, he couldn't have not known about them in any worlds where they were relevant. I -
- do you think it was a mistake to have you doing healing instead of bringing you in to do interrogations as well? That would have resulted in more deaths and doesn't seem straightforwardly worth it to have avoided coercive Truth-spells but I'm not sure I am modelling your objection to coercive Truth-spells correctly."
"It was a mistake not to ask me because no one who was here except me has a working understanding of how subtle arts or arcana work, healing doesn't take too much of my attention to quickly evaluate whether I have a good solution to a problem, and while in fact there may have been no serious danger and no better option I think it was worth ten seconds of my time to go 'hey Bella do you have a better way to find out a complete list of Melkor's Maiar'."
"That makes sense. I'm sorry; I should have asked you that. I think it would be very hard by any magic to get information from someone in a fashion less intrusive than a Truth Spell, it obliges the target if they know the answer to a question to answer it accurately and that's it. But I should've asked."
"He didn't use a Truth Spell per se, he imitated it with a compulsion. Is that approximately cosmetic? I don't know because no one thought to bring me in on it and let me ask before the fact. Did I have some kind of right to know? Arguably not but my accepting that I don't have a right to know everything that's going on and that I'm participating in led me to take actions in support of a plan at the risk of my friend's alt's life unbeknownst to me so I'm not wholeheartedly in favor of it right now!"
"In a perfect world where we did everything right, we would have asked you," Vanyel says. "Beforehand, even, when you were here the first time, if I'd been thinking ahead I could've guessed we'd run into this exact issue. That being said, I think it's the sort of mistake in prioritization and allocating personnel that's almost inevitable in any large military operation under time pressure, especially one where we had extremely good reasons to maintain really tight information security, because Melkor is - was - goddamned terrifying. And I also think you ought to be angry with me, not Leareth, since I'm in fact the one who started the questioning without thinking to ask you and then briefed him on what I'd been doing so far, and assumed that healing people would take your full attention, since Healers in our world absolutely can't be interrupted while working."
"I should have thought to ask you at the point where I was considering whether to wake Vanyel to apply another Truth Spell or closely imitate it with a compulsion," Leareth agrees. "I am not sure why I did not; likely part of it was the sense of time pressure, and part was not being sure how much healing-spell time an interruption would in fact cost you. I did ask Maitimo if there were any rules of engagement I ought to know, and expect he would have informed me if compulsions were harmful here."
"It is. I would definitely have told him - before I asked for him to come here and do this for us - if there were a risk some magic would behave differently on orcs than it did in Velgarth. We do not have any norms about conduct out-of-bounds even in wartime for the sake of accomplishing important military objectives, and I think the King's inclined right now against establishing any, but I eventually picked up enough about how humans fight wars that the question made sense."
"We talked about the concept some, in the past," Vanyel says, his voice controlled. (He is not going to snap at Bella in frustration, that is not going to help right now at all.) "Honestly, though, it's not clear to me if anything that happened here would be against the Heralds' general rules of conduct in wartime, and ours are actually tighter than a lot of neighbouring countries, Karse used blood-magic and demon-summoning constantly during the war with them. I've cast at a distance for battles where I didn't know the full strategy involved, because of information security or just because of time pressure, and sometimes my friends died. We use Truth Spell in legal proceedings even in peacetime. I've read sentries' minds in order to learn things I needed on the battlefield. I - think I would've been a lot more likely to grasp for other options if any of this had felt to me like it crossed any lines."
"I don't actually know that it's productive to hash this out right now. I apologize for - overextending myself in directions I perhaps shouldn't have instead of asking for what I needed to know sooner so we'd all be on the same page about what I was doing given how much basis to do it."
Vanyel ducks his head. "I'm sorry for...being frustrated and prickly about this, I guess. It's been a long war. I do think we could have told you more at the point when you were transporting me to Haven. Anyway, I think we're all absurdly grateful for your help. A lot more people might have died - hellfires, we might not have won at all - in the version where I had to use an inter-world Gate that Melkor could have detected and interfered with."
"It was an enormous relief, having a way to get the weapon that didn't seem to run some chance of leading Melkor right to it. We're grateful, and if there's anything we can do to fix the rest now that it's peacetime we will. Probably most additional discussion can wait until everyone has had some downtime. It sounds like the things that shouldn't sit for another month are getting Randi and Elspeth here for medical care and Vanyel and Leareth getting started on a way of finding new humans.
And - if there's anything our Leareth needs - now that the war's over -"
And they can go back to setting up their city.
He doesn't ask for more updates on his Leareth at all because it's not, actually, his Leareth, they knew each other for six months, if Leareth wants him to know anything he can tell his magic therapist that has him improving several hundred times faster than any Utumno survivor in history or his alternate universe version or his friend of twenty years or something.
He does bring the sexuality question up with his father and his father can in fact be angled into responding with 'the Valar are stupid' (it helps that this is little Fëanáro's opinion about absolutely everything including dozens of topics that have nothing to do with the Valar).
I should tote this Leareth back where he belongs at some point and look in on the other one.
I hate how - ugh. I hate being wedged by my own desire to be a good person by people who don't even know they're doing it. At least if they knew they were doing it there could be some sort of adversarial satisfaction in trying to outsmart them anyway, but what do I do with it when there's nothing there to even outsmart, just people underestimating me and then sitting on enough stuff that I have to keep showing up anyway?
I haven't met any of them before so I might be misreading them, but I think you probably have more leverage than just 'you could refuse to do them favors but there's a universe full of evil gods so you wouldn't refuse to do them favors no matter how poorly they repay them.' You could demand they agree to some rules about what they will and won't do, for example, I think probably they'd agree to that.
Maybe. The trouble is it'd be much better if it didn't have to be that rigid! I'm not myself that rigid! I would have agreed to interrogating the orcs that way and I would have agreed that it was Olórin's prerogative to undertake a suicide mission! But they didn't know that and they didn't think not - using me - was important compared to getting spells from me and -
Hmm. If they'd done all that to win some human war that was killing tens of thousands of people I'd be very angry with them, because it'd be obviously a horrendous miscalculation, thinking that getting one spell was more important than whatever delays and complications it might add to actually have your help. I think fighting Melkor is pretty different from that.
But it's hard to tell whether they in fact would have done the same thing either way, whether they were aware they were giving up something unfathomably important for something even more unfathomably important or whether they just didn't notice they were giving up something unfathomably important in the first place.
It has seemed like they didn't notice and are mostly trying to smooth over - superficial social hurt just because I've demonstrated I'm upset. Leareth was like 'you can yell at me' like he was planning on paying a yelling-denominated fine as the cost of doing business, he - I'm probably reading too much into this honestly and don't remember his exact words but it sounded at the time like he was practically daring me to stop teleporting him places over it -
Well I wouldn't have had any trouble but in their partial defense I think there are a lot of reasons why it's bad to mind-control people and some of them are inapplicable here and many of them are still applicable but overridden by other considerations and many of them are - applicable for reasons of precedents set which makes their applicability sort of smuggled in with the question of whether we're mad at them -
- and that's the sort of thing most people aren't accustomed to distinguishing carefully at all, even if they could pass a test with a hundred questions about whether mind control is okay in this situation yes or no.
Yeah, that's a good way to - disentangle it. She sighs. It really didn't help that I was going in hoping to just uncomplicatedly trust them because I know the other Van and I know our Fëanáro and would like to believe everyone they could grow up into and every child they could raise would be, not just great but also well-positioned to trust me in turn even though that's presumably very path dependent actually.
I should hope it's not path-dependent, actually? You're smart and you're trustworthy and you're intellectually careful and you care about this - grand project that I guess we've all stepped into, of combining all the magic systems to fight all the gods and fix everything. But I think it's - going to be slow. I'll be much more annoyed with them if I don't think they're even progressing in that direction but I don't actually begrudge them taking a long time.
Melkor -
- I should've talked more about Melkor, then maybe people would've understood -
And they don't even want to be better. Or not badly enough, anyway.
Melkor uses all the good things about people against them. The wanting to talk, wanting to understand, wanting to trust - wanting to do the right thing - and I'm not saying you should fight him by giving up on talking and understanding and trusting and doing the right thing but - but I feel safer, when they treat us like strangers, when they act vaguely bewildered at the reminder that in normal interpersonal interaction everything they did is pretty far out of line -
Once the debrief is done and it seems like things have quieted down, Leareth looks for Maitimo.
(In the background, he's quietly frustrated about the entire interaction with Bella. It seems like he can't do reasonable ally things even when he's trying, and it's also impossible to communicate about it without just making things worse, and at this point he would kind of prefer to ignore the situation for a while and let it cool off rather than try to address it again, even though he probably should try to address it eventually. There has to be a reason why it didn't actually seem like a live option to talk to Bella first, but he doesn't have good enough recall of what he was thinking at the time to unravel it.)
"Do you still need me here?" he asks Maitimo once he tracks him down.
"No. You're of course always welcome - and might want to seriously consider relocating some of your operations, you wouldn't have to tell me where but should probably tell me whether to reserve a chunk of the continent - but I think we've checked everything anyone can think of related to the evil gods being gone, and the orcs almost certainly won't be organized enough to challenge us and if they do Vanyel will have an unpleasant day but the city'll hold.
If you send my father an overview of your plans he'll be able to figure out who we should be recruiting to take a look at them."
The offer is confusing and kind of unsettling, for reasons he doesn't fully understand, but Leareth nods. "Thank you. I will consider it, and let you know as promptly as I can about any continent reservations. If you need me to return urgently, Vanyel knows the inter-world communication spell and ought to be able to contact me with it, or of course Bella can use the earcuff if she is here."
Oh.
He's not sure how to respond to that, at first, except that it only reinforces the feeling he's already been having for a while.
I want to go back to Arda, he thinks finally, just as Bella and his alt are approaching the hall where his room is, and it feels hard to explain why, so he sort of shoves some half-formed thoughts in her.
Vanyel, his Vanyel, is there. Maitimo is there. He misses the Quendi singing. And...it's probably safer than Velgarth, now, the Valar other than Melkor are hopeless at a lot of things but they're not trying to destroy him. He's not in any position to be the level of paranoid and cautious that he needs to be, in a world where the gods are against any of his plans ever succeeding. He wants to be back in a world that lets him have allies.
Then Leareth will start at the beginning and tell his alt a summary of everything that's happened. He mostly elides his suboptimal handling of the compulsions thing with Bella, both because he's not even sure how to describe it accurately and because it's not something his alt needs to worry about right now.
He does mention Maitimo's offer. Several offers. He doesn't say that he's confused about it.
But it's kind of apparent anyway. Reading your own body language is easier than reading someone else, it turns out.
Trying to describe why it makes perfect sense for Maitimo to offer that proves surprisingly hard.
"We worked well together," he says finally. "He - is trying to be good. He wants to save all of the people. And...I imagine he knows he cannot stop you from moving people there in secret if you wish, so his offer does not really change things from that perspective."
"Well, you could do it with his blessing instead, and I am certain he would tell you of anything relevant." Deep breath. "I want to go back. Now that the war is over and it is safe there. I cannot actually go home, yet, but - it feels more like home than here, and Vanyel is there."
Angband Leareth hauls himself out of bed, he's exhausted from spending all day stressed about the battle happening in another world that he couldn't do anything to help with, but he can manage doing this on his feet, and carry his luggage himself.
He pushes the door open. There's still the momentary freeze when he tries to leave his room, but it's gotten easier to route around. "Bella, I am ready." Can you do the calm thing. Deciding to go back to Arda is really stressful, it turns out! Even though it's something he badly wants. Maybe more so, because of that.
He's relieved to sit down, even with the calm effect he's kind of shaky, but it's surprising how much of a relief it is to be back. Especially given how many awful things happened in this world. He can even hear people singing in the distance - which on some deep-buried level sends a jolt of fear through him, probably it's related to some stupid horrible fake memory or maybe a dozen of them, but he's calm and he can let that pass.
"Thank you," he tells Bella. "You can go back to your work."
He realizes a few moments later that of course he can't Mindspeak Vanyel to let him know that he's here. Osanwë works the same way that Bella's subtle arts do, though; he just has to think his thoughts public, and try to do it to a particular person.
Maitimo?
And now he has no idea what to say. His brain grinds on it for a few seconds before he can formulate words.
I apologize if I am disturbing you. I wished to return to Arda. Sudden wash of - not panic, he's too forcibly calm for that, but doubt-worry-fear tangled together - he didn't even think to ask Bella whether that was all right with the Noldor, it would be entirely reasonable fo them not to want him within hundreds of miles after he helped Melkor.
I hope you do not mind, he finishes, uncertainly.
Of course we're glad to have you for as long as you'd like to stay. I will try to arrange a place for you - we're building our new city, now, at last, so you will have to forgive us some construction noise - do you have your magic back or should I get Vanyel to shield it -
...He's startled and amazed that Maitimo thinks he might have his magic back. No. Because it would be a terrible idea, but he doesn't make that thought public. I - would appreciate Vanyel shielding it. I am at the infirmary where Bella is working, which is fine, but - if there is a more private place I could stay, that would be nice.
Leareth involuntarily shrinks back a little when he sees Maitimo approaching, but that's stupid, and he forces himself to relax. It is very good to see you again. That much is true, even if it's also inexplicably - no, probably very explicably - terrifying. Is it far? He's still so tired.
Leareth walks a distance away. He's vaguely wishing that something were different but he isn't sure what. He does slowly relax more, as the parts of him that are very glad to see Maitimo win out against the memories of not-even-very-convincing fake Maitimo being very kind to him for a while and then turning around and hurting him - or being angry - or worse... But that wasn't real and this is; on top of all the other accumulating evidence, which part of him is still quietly tallying, at this point it's too goddamned weird not to be.
"Vanyel seems well," he says finally. "You took good care of him."
You won. Leareth looks away, shoulders hunching a little. I am sorry. About the Gates. About...everything. He doesn't know what the rest of the 'everything' is but it feels like there has to be something there.
He keeps expecting Maitimo to be angry, even though objectively speaking that doesn't at all seem like the thing Maitimo would do, here.
You landed by accident in a strange world and immediately decided to help prevent a civil war and almost as immediately identified it the work of an evil god. You got us out of Valinor safely and then realized you needed the assistance of a powerful acquaintance whose trust you'd earned by spending decades talking with him even when you thought someday you'd have to kill him. It worked. You got us the resources we needed to win the war. And also in the course of five years of torture the Enemy on one occasion managed to get you into an information state where you'd do him favors!
Shiver. From what I can tell, (limited because he hates looking at the Angband memories even though he definitely needs to sort through them and figure out what his mistakes were and why it took him so long to notice what was happening), he did not actually torture me before the Gates. He - repeatedly tried to be convincing, and erased my memory of his failed attempts. There were at least several hundred iterations.
Leareth flinches again when he sees Vanyel, though he controls it fairly quickly, and stepping across the threshold takes a surprising amount of effort, pushing through pointless mental resistance.
(Leareth still isn't sure why entering or leaving rooms is so saliently scary, relative to just walking somewhere; as far as he can tell, it doesn't even feature in any of his hallucinatory rescue memories because he didn't...do things...in them. It might be that it feels more obviously like an action or decision, and it's also true that nearly all of his memories of talking to Melkor involved entering a room. And, often, leaving it expecting to die.)
He manages it. There's a bed, which he heads straight for. It has a blanket and he wraps it tightly around himself. It's sort of stupid that this helps but it does.
Vanyel goes slowly and carefully, both because he wants Leareth to get a good look, and because he wants to do it right - it's important, they cannot in fact guarantee yet that they're perfectly safe here and he would feel so awful if something happened to Leareth when he didn't have magic to defend himself.
Leareth stumbles over all the words that feel either appropriate or true, eventually just nods. He's thought so much about what to say; he doesn't understand why he can't, now.
"I - think I missed Arda," he manages, a minute later. "There are so many things about your people which are very good. Even if most of them are not skilled at paranoia."
He looks down. It's suddenly too hard again to speak out loud. They are skilled at trust instead, he says, unfortunately to just Maitimo because Thoughtsensing doesn't work that way. I...think I learned something, from it. What it is like to - have allies.
(And his alt doesn't have that, not yet, but that's a thought Leareth is still struggling to pin down.)
"Did you think I was going to stay in Velgarth? There are far too many gods there who wish me dead. The remaining Valar seem less of a threat to my wellbeing, especially a continent away. Even if they are not very competent." He manages a slight smile. "If they did wish to kill me, they might not be very competent at it either."
"Oh. I had not asked about that," (and he really should have) "but that makes sense. I will have to go back at some point. I, just... I suppose it did not really feel like home, staying in the other Velgarth, where all the people were not quite the versions I knew. And I feel much less comfortable being in Velgarth at all when I do not have magic."
He really wants his magic back. It's a stupid idea and they shouldn't give it to him but it's still an insistent ache, he feels helpless every time he remembers.
Shrug. "I am not sure how long it will take before I can - do things."
It should be okay but it doesn't feel that okay, right now. Leareth hugs the blanket more tightly around himself. He's desperately exhausted at this point; listening to people talking is starting to feel metaphorically like someone grinding broken glass against his ears, one part of him only wants some space and quiet but another part wants the odd reassurance of these specific people, who just won the war when he couldn't, nearby and keeping him safe.
He is basically ignoring his food.
Yeah. It's hard feeling like he's looking for something and I don't know what it is - he wanted to read my mind, it was one of the things he asked for earlier, one of the things Melkor had a hard time faking, and I want to let him have as much evidence on that front as he can use but also it feels like there are so many minefields, things I might think about that'll scare him or set him back - though he's doing really well -
That's very convenient. Vanyel sketches out magic notes for a few hours, and then yawns, excuses himself, and wanders off to bed. He puts some wards on his own room but much less thoroughly; he, unlike Leareth, can wake up and defend himself with powerful magic in the extremely unlikely event that orcs show up with no warning.
Leareth sleeps solidly for the next eight hours or so, the nightmare block is holding up well. As usual, though, he wakes up kind of disoriented - a lot more so than usual, actually, he doesn't recognize the room he's in. He holds very still, instinctively tries to reach out with Othersenses he doesn't have and then whimpers involuntarily, quietly enough that a human would probably miss it but audible to Quendi hearing.
Please. He focuses for a moment on controlling his breathing, trying not to let himself get any more panicked than he already is.
Can you. Check if Bella is in range to do the calm thing. She might be in range for Leareth to try to think at her, but he's not sure, and trying to do that feels too hard anyway.
Leareth shakes his head, helplessly. Speaking is nearly impossible again. I am not sure what is bad, he thinks at her. Just - scared...
Less so now, the calm helps, but it doesn't get rid of the strange not-quite-dizziness, the feeling that he somehow can't orient to the reality around him - he knows it's real but it doesn't feel real, or something, none of those are really the right words but he sort of holds up the whole vague nebulous heap of it. You can read my mind. If you want.
Yes. Leareth makes a brief, fruitless attempt to stop crying and then gives up, it just seems to be a thing happening to him right now. I think when I feel this way it usually goes away, but sometimes it takes hours. He pokes at that thought some more. I am - concerned it is a mental motion that I practiced a great deal in Angband because it made - things - easier to tolerate, but it is very annoying now.
He nods, and puts it on. (It still feels like an extremely unsafe category of action, interacting with a magic thing even if it's not his magic thing, but also there are multiple people around to make sure nothing actually bad happens.)
...He can't actually Mindspeak to Nayoki to tell her he's there, but he focuses on her, she's the one he wants to be in range of...
He feels like he's very firmly in reality again. Yes, he thinks, although right now it's not clear that it is better. He's much too aware of having, for example, skin, and his stomach is kind of upset - probably from spending a while half-panicking until Bella got there.
Bella can have the earcuff back now, if she wants.
Thank you.
Leareth manages to stop crying, and swing his legs over the edge of the bed. He puts his head down in his hands. I am sorry for interrupting. I - if I need the calm again, can you do it from the earcuff so you do not need to come all the way over?
He glances around to see if Maitimo is even still there.
Yes. It's a lot harder to deal with the constant background scaredscaredscared when he isn't calm about it, but he needs to practice anyway. Probably there is not anything you can do to make getting used to new places easier...? He thinks that's most of why waking up was worse today than average.
Leareth sits up. Maitimo, can you– He stops, tries to figure out what he actually wants. Which isn't to interrupt Vanyel in the middle of his work or sleep just because he's now on the same planet. When Vanyel is free, he corrects, I would like if he came here and looked at the wards and you helped share his mage-sight again. I know they are there, just... It would help.
Thank you.
Leareth isn't sure what he's supposed to do next (which is still a far easier question than what he wants to do next). He had something of a routine back in his alt's compound, even if it was a stupid routine that mostly held a lot of sleeping and reading books unrelated to anything important.
...Oh, right, there is the request he made, which Maitimo specified he was willing to fulfil now that the war is over. Though maybe he's changed his mind, since, and also it's not clear how it would work since Leareth doesn't even have Thoughtsensing right now.
Asking is absurdly harder than waiting for him to offer, but Leareth can't be sure if he's going to offer at any point, so - make the leap, do what gets him the most information - check that it's not an action that could destroy anything if he were completely wrong about his current context even though he's very, very sure he's not in Angband - no, if he were still in Angband then Melkor wouldn't be able to fake Maitimo's thoughts, he never could in the few attempts he made, probably the offer wouldn't be happening at all then...
He takes a deep breath. You - offered - that I could - read your thoughts now - is that still...?
Sharing with osanwë is fine. He trusts Maitimo.
...Or, well, in the world where all of this is real - which he's pretty sure is where he is - then he trusts Maitimo to be an ally in saving all of the worlds, and it's not clear whether that means Maitimo would always tell him the truth, but - it's almost better, right, if it means that Maitimo would do whatever he thought was best for the mission, that means he can afford to stop tracking it for a bit... He doesn't think Maitimo would lie, and - if he did, and shared incompletely, Leareth believes it would be for a good reason, one he would endorse if he were - less broken - and knew all the relevant information.
After a moment's consideration, he makes that tangle of thought available to Maitimo too, because - it seems important, somehow, that Maitimo knows how he's thinking and feeling about it right now. That's part of what it means, to really and truly have allies, that you share your decision process with them.
I will not always tell you all of the truth but I think I can, here and now. I talked with Vanyel last night, about whether there were things I should try to make sure you didn't see. He thought you were - easy to scare but not very permanently scared. Based on which I'd rather just let you know things. If there were, say, any escaped Maiar or any pressing problems we still needed to solve I would keep that from you, so I guess there's the argument I should keep the symmetric information that there's not from you too, but that's making things awfully complicated and I assume whatever it is you're hoping you'll get out of this, you'll get more of it if things are more straightforward.
Leareth thinks (privately) that he isn't actually sure what he wants from this, except for a baseline sense that more information is always worth having. And...hmm, and it feels like it'll help, to know more specifically about Maitimo's current stance towards him. He feels like he doesn't quite know where he stands, with Maitimo or with Vanyel, and that means he can't predict what they're likely to do. The world under him would feel more solid if he did know.
Externally, he just nods.
He sits down. He tries - letting Leareth in to see his thoughts.
Maitimo's model of Leareth wouldn't blame them for letting him get captured. The other, non-tortured Leareth, who usually accords pretty well with Maitimo's model of Leareth and when he diverges tend to diverge in the direction of having fewer criticisms of Maitimo, doesn't blame them for letting him get captured. And yet - they did. They could have been carefuller and cleverer and prevented it and Leareth was tortured for years as a result and - he hasn't apologized, but he regrets it very intensely, he wishes he'd been better, he tried to get better afterwards, he will set it right eventually no matter how long it takes.
He doesn't know how to help. It's painful, not knowing people stuff is always painful, and especially not knowing how to help someone you love who is suffering right in front of you because you failed them. It's painful sometimes accidentally making things worse, and not knowing why that happened either - he's not sure why Leareth came here, he's glad of it but he would've expected Leareth to want to be in some place he had happier memories of - and maybe there isn't any such place, maybe what Maitimo thinks of as the worst six months of his life were better for Leareth than an average six months in his own world, among his own people, but with all the forces of the universe arrayed against him and a nightmarish task ahead -
- the other Leareth is so baffled about Maitimo wanting to help him with the plan to build a god and Maitimo doesn't know how to explain it, he's said the obvious things and it feels like something just hasn't quite clicked, the thing he was tempted to do was take the Thoughtsensing amulet off but he thinks that'll actually make things worse because it's a more baffling thing to do - and it would be embarrassing if the other Leareth thought he wasn't paranoid enough - also there's all kinds of politics now around the fact Leareth used to mindread people so casually, and it's obviously different if it's consensual but Maitimo still doesn't particularly want to deal with it right now.
And now Leareth is crying again.
You are not making it worse, he tells Maitimo, quickly, he doesn't want him to be stuck thinking that. He's not upset, really, just - overwhelmed, and confused - but noting Maitimo's confusion about his alt actually clarifies it, because he thinks it's the same shape or at least the same direction of error in his world-model. A Leareth doesn't find it easy to trust people. Not after thousands of years of the Velgarth gods using every handle they could against him. And - he thinks there might be something important that happened, during his six months in Arda, and his alt doesn't have that. It's...not quite about the appropriate level of paranoia? He and his alt are fully aligned on the appropriate caution to have around Melkor, he thinks, but - well, it matters, that the best thing he could do for the war effort, for all of his goals and values, once he was in Angband, was to give up and stop doing things, and he could only make that mental move because he trusted Maitimo and Vanyel to carry his mission, their mission, onward.
His alt certainly wouldn't let Maitimo read his thoughts, like Leareth is doing right now. Leareth was surprised enough that he let Bella look at his core memories, and that was desperately necessary, as a prerequisite to Bella helping him put the fragments of himself back together.
He had really hoped that would help more; on some level, maybe he'd hoped it would just fix everything, get him back to normal. It did help, a lot, that he can trust the centre of his self and motivations more, but it still feels like his core memories are - not wrong, but incomplete, missing something critical that he never recognized until it was gone. And, of course, he's still terrified of nearly everything, which is exhausting and eats most of his mental resources.
That is true. His alt must be trying to make that transition as well, he knew about the other worlds before, but it's clearly different for him in some way.
And Maitimo's guess is right; there isn't an obvious place back in Velgarth that he has happier memories of. He would prefer not to go back to the caves ever, but the new city, as it takes shape, is going to be more like Tirion than like said caves.
He misses Tirion under the light of the Trees.
He does, too. They'll build something better, of course, but they cannot build anything quite as innocently, wastefully, generously, uncomplicatedly good, now. They are different people now, all of them, after a year of war, and their safe places will have walls that aren't just for show, and spare resources will be diverted to preventing mass deaths in other worlds where people are mortal and their gods indifferent. And he's glad of it, but he misses Tirion under the light of the Trees. Bella's world still has Trees, maybe the Valar here can reconstruct the Trees from the other live Trees or something.
He wants Leareth to be happy. He wants it very badly. It feels like some enormous imbalance, in the universe, that Leareth has done so much and been loved for so little of it.
He flinches a little - it's the thing he would've held back, except they'd thought that maybe it'd be better not to hold back, and he's sorry if he was wrong about that - it's not just the part of him which Lórien can fix and which he still hasn't been able to make himself go to Lórien about, it's really not, he's pretty sure that most of it will still be there even once he does that and it can be soon if it's a problem - it's just that Leareth matters, and ought to be all right, and that the way Leareth has pursued his goals is beautiful and terrible and admirable and it's not a path Maitimo wants him to walk alone anymore -
Leareth hugs himself, focuses on breathing. Keeps all of his thoughts private until he's slightly calmer and his mind is less an incoherent mess of nonsensical emotions and thought-fragments that won't make sense to anyone else.
You did not say anything wrong, he manages. Please do not go to Lórien. He has no idea why Maitimo thinks that would help. He doesn't think Maitimo did or thought or felt anything wrong, here.
Leareth focuses on breathing, waits for his heartbeat to slow; it would be a lot faster if Bella could do the calm thing but she just did and he doesn't want to start relying on it too much.
Finally, he feels able to uncover his face and sit up. I am sorry. This cannot be a very pleasant visit for you - you do not have to stay...
Leareth nods, hesitantly.
He's wishing that Maitimo could help more, too - he wishes anything helped more, really, people keep telling him that it's okay if he needs a long time but apparently he isn't that patient when the problem is 'not being able to do things or make plans' rather than, say, a plan that plays out over centuries.
Maitimo is helping a lot, though, just by - being the person he is, competent and on top of things and quick to learn the appropriate level of caution, and working well with Vanyel, so that Leareth can trust that someone is making sure the world holds together while he can't.
...Also by just being here, even when all he's doing is holding still and not speaking. It would be understandable if he had better things to do, since Leareth is really useless right now, but - he feels obscurely safer, with Maitimo there.
...Confusing. But, Leareth reminds himself, confusing in the same direction his alt is confused about, with Maitimo's offer to help with his god plan. Leareth isn't confused about that at all. It's exactly the sort of thing he expects Maitimo to do - expects the Noldor to do in general, they have that kind of generosity, they can afford it - they grew up in paradise...
And maybe this isn't different in principle, someone wanting to help him, personally, just because they can and they can spare the time and resources - he still feels like he's not quite understanding it, but maybe that's close enough. And he can be glad of it anyway, even if it's confusing.
Confusing!!! ...And also kind of scary, but it's easier to unpack, this time, it's mostly because things that violate his priors about the world or confuse him feel dangerous, it means his predictions about the future are likely to be unreliable, and that's especially terrifying when his ability to do anything about unexpected events is so limited. But none of that is new information. He already knows that he's very helpless, right now, and his safety is entirely dependent on others.
Others who have pretty good reasons to make sure he's okay, even if only for instrumental reasons, because he isn't useful right now but he might be again someday. Leareth knows that isn't what Maitimo is trying to say right now, but it's easier to believe, to put weight on.
Sigh. He wants to wrap his head around the other thing, because - well, it's easy to notice that his alt is missing something and might actually be able to operate more effectively in this new, bigger, far more complicated world if he understood it better. And, consistency. Neither of those things solves the problem but it helps.
"I think I should eat something," he says out loud.
"It's on the shore of the ocean, and Ulmo's supportive, so we'll have lots of fish even though we don't know much about fishing. We're going to use the Silmarils for light. We're considering setting up something to rotate them so areas of the city have a day/night cycle, humans seem to speak well of it. It needs to look pretty from the air, because Bella's magic lets people fly..." and he can send over some design sketches.
It's reassuring. Leareth relaxes a little. Thanks Vanyel when he's done.
"I think I want to be alone now," he tells Maitimo. He needs to work on writing his notes of what's happened since he arrived, and it's easier to do undistracted. "Thank you for coming over - for staying..."
It'd be nice! I think mostly people where I'm from wait before moving in with their boyfriends but probably they aren't, like, already best friends who've known each other for twenty years and are jointly responsible for a small child. I'm thinking a little loft for him above the bookshelves, come look and help me make sure it's pretty enough.
A couple of days later, when they're more caught up on cleanup and things are falling back into a routine and Angband Leareth seems more settled, Vanyel goes looking for Bella. It's been in the back of his mind for days that he probably needs to do this, and - he doesn't want to at all, actually, but it's important so he steels himself and does it anyway.
"Hey. If you're, um, not busy, I think we should talk."
Aaaaaaah can she possibly make this easier instead of maximally hard Vanyel is aware that this is an uncharitable thought, he's been having them for days.
"I don't know. Just - with the things you were frustrated about, I think you must've been coming into this with - pretty different expectations from what I would've had? I mean, it...makes sense, that you were upset, we put you in a tough position. I, just..."
Possibly he is not as ready for attempting this conversation as he'd hoped, because he still has no idea how to put the thing he means into words.
Vanyel tries not to grit his teeth, or get too defensive, it's really not going to help. "I'm sorry. That - must've hurt, to find out after the fact. And, I'm not sure how but we probably could've been better at communicating, somehow. There's a concept Leareth has, of - how people tend to assume other people are like them unless they've explicitly noticed otherwise? And I guess I assumed, you've worked with Heralds, you'd have the same - general priors - that I do..." Helpless shrug. "In hindsight that's not actually obvious, and - I don't know. I'm sorry things went the way they did."
Vanyel finds his shoulders tensing. He forces himself to relax. "I did - update on that. But - hmm, well, it'd be different if you knew another me who was my age. I remember myself at eighteen and I do not have much faith in my eighteen-year-old self's judgement. Maybe you at eighteen were less of a mess than me and so it'd be different..." Vanyel lifts a hand and lets it fall. "He mostly talked about the therapy you did with him. Which - I'm so glad he has you, he's going to be much happier than I've been, but - it's sort of the case that you're helping him grow in a different direction than the one I did, and that makes it harder to compare, right?"
"I've changed a lot in the last - gods, fourteen, fifteen years? And - part of that was the war with Karse. You know, I guess I changed in ways that I didn't necessary like, when I noticed them happening at the time, but - that I think were adaptive, for fighting wars, and that I'm glad I had when this war dropped on my head. And - some other things happened, that shifted how I think about trust. Honestly I look back at myself from the early 790s and it feels like I was way too trusting of the people around me. I - hadn't seen, yet, how you can have a whole lot of people who're basically on the same side, and trying really, really hard to do the right thing, and still screw it up in each other's eyes, and harm each other's goals..."
It's not even just the war, Vanyel thinks - it might not be mostly the war - it's, just, everything that happened in the years of his conversations with Leareth - everything that happened after that one awful night when Yfandes walked away– This is not a helpful memory to be dwelling on right now and he tries to shove it away.
"I think I was pretty defensive, the other day," he says, looking down again. "Because - well, from my end it seemed like we'd just won a war with Melkor, who trust me is a thousand times scarier than anyone I fought on the Karsite side, and - with fewer casualties than just about any single battle in the war with Karse. I think we made some mistakes but overall we did pretty damned well and - I guess it hurt, to feel attacked after trying so hard for so long to do the right thing here. A lot of our interactions with you were - trying to make it as little as possible a gamble, to cordon off how much you could harm our cause if you weren't trustworthy. And - gods, I've been on the other side of that and it doesn't feel good, so I'm sorry. But - it felt like a pretty reasonable decision process to be running, given the information we actually had at the time, when we were at war with Melkor and we thought we had a way to win but it was only going to have a chance of working if it caught him totally unawares, and also he'd managed to capture Leareth of all people and so it felt like it might not be possible to be paranoid enough."
"Yeah, that's about how Maitimo explained it.
Rúmil told me - Melkor uses the good things about people against them, the impulse to be trusting and talk things out and try to understand people. So it's an indicator that you were - set up in a responsible defensive posture, that you didn't do that with me. And realistically it was much more important to be set up in a responsible defensive posture, since you were fighting Melkor.
That having been said if I were actually working for Melkor you'd all have been screwed regardless. I'm a subtle artist with an interplanar earcuff."
Vanyel's shoulders sag a little. "I figured. Though - I mean, we were already screwed in that case, right, from the moment it was obvious you could find and contact us at all, having more conversations with you didn't increase the threat-surface-area much. Or I figured, anyway, possibly Leareth would've caught something I didn't."
He fidgets with the hem of his tunic. "I'm - not used to thinking of 'the impulse to be trusting' as an uncomplicatedly good thing. Though trying to understand people and be charitable to their reasoning when it's different from yours is closer to just-always-good - I think those are pretty different motions. Trusting people and being transparent is good if you're working with trustworthy people who want to cooperate, and bad with adversarial actors, and - I guess a lot of my work has been with some degree of adversaries. Even the Council - they're not value-aligned with Heralds, not really, they care about Valdemar too but they have their own agendas and it'd be stupid to trust them and be open with them the way I am with, say, Savil. - and I can't even trust Savil with everything, I didn't trust her - or any of the Heralds, really - to reason clearly about the Leareth situation. Their Companions still have the issue that made Yfandes walk out on me until she'd fixed it, for one."
He frowns. "I think some of what we were trying to protect against was - you not being as trustworthy or value-aligned as my alt thought. Which, I mean, almost no one is as trustworthy as he was claiming you are. I am updating very hopefully toward him being right, even if his decision to trust you initially seems overly hasty to me, and - well, now is a much better time to actually do the talking things out. Which is - why I'm trying to."
"Not really, no." Vanyel takes a deep breath. "I - gods, I don't know how to say this right, but. I hope we can become friends on our own terms, now that things are less on fire and there's more slack for it, just, I don't think you should be thinking of me as the same person as my alt, and - definitely not expecting me to automatically have 'rapport' with you because he does. It - I'm sorry, just, it kind of made me bristle when you said that."
"You know, that's a good point, I think he might be. Not entirely, but - he seems to trust Maitimo way more than he would normally ever trust someone he just met - and, er, whose mind he can't read."
Vanyel rubs his chin. “I - hmm. It’s not that I don’t get why you’re annoyed with him for decisions the other day. He does tend toward just doing things unilaterally and it's frustrating. But - I think that's a really deeply engrained thing for him, not trusting anyone or relying on anyone, and it makes sense to me given his life experience. Honestly, going by what my alt said he's putting way more effort and inconvenience into cooperating with you than he did after a decade of talking to me." (Vanyel is, perhaps, a tiny bit hurt about this, but he's trying to shove that aside because it's stupid.) "Just - I think maybe he can't trust people the way you wish people would trust you, I think it might not be a mental motion he knows how to do. And..."
He looks down. Why does he even care about this so much? "I guess I feel a bit protective of him, for some reason, it's not like he needs it and I bet he's not upset and thinks it's very reasonable of you to be miffed with him and might well think he made a mistake, but...I don't know, I don't want people going around being disappointed in him for being Leareth-shaped, I guess."
Nod. "That makes sense. He's probably annoyed with himself about that, but honestly I tend to make the same mistake at least a dozen times before learning better from it sticks. I...guess I just want to point out that trusting you is probably something he has to work really hard for."
"My Leareth is actually the one who said something about that to me! Which is really interesting. He's having way less trouble than I would've expected with - well, the fact that he hates having to rely on other people and also is completely reliant on other people for everything right now. I hope that means there's something about Arda that was good for him on that axis, before Angband happened, and it'll be good for your Leareth too once he's been here more. Or maybe it's Maitimo in particular. He seems to get Leareth weirdly well."
"Yfandes thinks it's good for me too. It–" He would absolutely not have felt comfortable saying something this personal to Bella ten minutes ago, so it's probably a good sign that he does, the clearing-the-air conversation helped. "It makes me feel - less fragile? Like I'm normal, not - someone who needs a lot of accommodations to function. Maitimo thinks I'm really low-maintenance, which is objectively hilarious, but it's also not wrong compared to Quendi. I told him about the conditions I had to work under during the Karsite war and he said it would just straight-up kill them."
"- no? Thankfully, I was nearly captured a few times due to being stupid. It - wasn't that bad, really, by human standards. I was just on the Border for years, and everything was ugly and my feet were always damp and my clothes were always gross and the food was awful. And most of the time I was alone and constantly on the move, because if the Karsites managed to ferret out which camp I was in they'd attack it. Understandably, it sometimes felt like I was half of Valdemar's total firepower just by myself." Shrug. "It was really bad for me. I was so miserable - and I hadn't been miserable before the war started, I was doing fine in 797 before Lancir died. But I think Savil at age thirty would've coped no problem."
"She would've coped better at least. Gods, I used to imagine sometimes, what if the war with Karse had started when I was seventeen. I wouldn't have been able to cope at all and I'm not sure they would've had a choice but to send me anyway. I'm really glad that isn't what happened."
"...Sorry, that was a digression. Anyway: Arda is really nice. I was trying to explain to Maitimo that the last six months, all of which we spent at war with Melkor, were less stressful than the average of my life for the last five years and he was so baffled. But - Quendi are really good." He makes a face. "I think in a way that made them more exploitable to Melkor, in Valinor? No one even considered the hypothesis it was him until Leareth turned up and pointed it out within five minutes. But - we won, and I really hope that means Arda gets to stay nice, now, and - keep being a place where people just trust each other by default. Even if I'm probably never going to learn how to do that."