"Yes but she still might not default to it rather than to 'maximally annoy Sauron if this is Sauron'."

"I'll bear that in mind. Saurons are annoyed about having successfully made their victims averse to physical affection, really? -"

"No, not at all, but they love it when we go to them willingly."

"Ah."

"...I don't know how determined to navigate that in particular you are, but - every time she'll expect it to turn into something else halfway through, that's the whole point - and you can tell yourself that you'd rather just know, but it's still hard to make yourself seek it out -"

"I'm not in a hurry." Ruefully: "I can lucid dream. But - hugs would be nice."

"I do not expect hugs to be a problem at all."

Nod. "Boots is useful. I've got more oomph but she doesn't have to meditate on a skill she wants for five to ten years before it comes in and she's got actual training, I was expecting to have to spend ages on collecting whatever dubious this-and-that and turning it into some kind of regimen and half-guessing on whether she'd even want me to go through with it..."

"Honestly? She could have put herself back together, she just didn't need to and it's horribly unpleasant. If the war'd still been ongoing she'd have done it."

"Well. Instead she got to spend a while in a coma and now I can put Elves in comas. She didn't even need to eat, the soul-controlling-the-body thing stretches that way under the right push apparently."

"That's useful. ...it wasn't you, it's that - the first time we put ourselves together and it's so awful but there's the promise that you'll have forever once you just get it together, and then it's a lie, and the second time and the third time you push just as hard because in principle you should act like it's real except insofar as it helps the Enemy and this doesn't, and then eventually it becomes harder and harder to do it just on the off chance it were real and mattered and didn't just open you up to hurt even more when it turns out to be a lie -"

"- what will it have done to have gone in knowing that it was definitely feasible for Isabella to kill the Enemy, though?"

"I have no idea - she's probably going to be significantly psychologically healthier than in the standard trajectory, because of that and also the averted horrors, but in addition to everything else Sauron had psionics to play around again -"

"I don't think Liz had enough time to learn much besides what I know to have been her precognition range and maybe a little of one or two other things. And she was insulated from the really overtly unjustifiable stuff, whenever I managed to convince her it happened Maira deleted the conversation out of her head."

"That's actually very encouraging."

"Well, sure, if she buys that Liz didn't have very long sidereal, but one time a few weeks went by and she had twenty fucking years of memories -"

"...they can't do that, they can do some serious dilation but not like that."

"...yeah, that's - either a lot of psionic help or something else going on -"

"Liz didn't have enough time to do that at all, that would be intensely complicated - I haven't even picked up thought acceleration in spite of how stupidly useful it would be because it just takes so damn long to get even if the psion has a knack for it! And we have to do our own detail work, she would've had to compose the twenty years of memories to just put them in, and she didn't have time to do that. I can't chalk that up to Liz. Did I have a nonstandard Melkor...?"

"Only nonstandard Melkor so far is the one that produces evil Ardas - uh, did you see that note yet, it is an upsetting topic - most Melkors are not trying that hard to kill everyone, but I don't have much reason to think they were holding back on the torture -"

"Skimmed it. Okay, why else would she turn up in a dream with twenty years of memories -" Bounce.

"I mean, maybe Sauron can do a sloppy job? Insert memories directly without the interim having been lived - which would require composing them all and disguising that there aren't twenty years worth of them -"

"...I guess that would explain why she'd refer to people as 'somebody' and 'some Earth musician'?"

"It wouldn't hold up long but if you were always there as soon as she fell asleep it wouldn't have to in order to serve some small sadistic purpose? And normally they wouldn't do it that way but you were dropping eidetic memory on her all the time and the usual hallucinations rely on a lot of backtracking."

"Sauron doesn't actually do a very convincing Bell until he's had lots of practice."