"She's... having a rough time. She came here because I'm the other Bell with a you but honestly the parallels aren't, or aren't as much as you'd naively guess, I'm not sure how much I helped."

"Should I talk with my alt -"

"What would you tell her?" wonders Kib.

"....probably that she should just get it together and act normally?"

"When I say the parallels aren't, I mean - it's not even so much that I by comparison have got Aydanci and Findekáno to lean on, it's that you have Findekáno, whereas Sibyl is - not only working from a cultural framework that loaded her up with an archetype of caretaking-type responsibilities but also is the only person in the picture who can discharge same. But I'm not sure that's even the problem, the problem is she currently feels like Dream literally doesn't understand her, has no idea how to explain, does not know how long this has been going on - because, eidetic memory, so if she doesn't understand her now that seems likely to mean either that she never did in the first place or that she's so fucked up as to have no access to concepts that Sibyl considers relationship fundamentals anymore -"

"Or considers them reserved for the sort of person she doesn't qualify as anymore."

"Okay, if it's that, yeah, tell your alt to cut it out, what the fuck."

"I don't know if it's that or more checking whether it's Sauron, but it's one of those."

"How would you tell the difference?"

"Not being able to tell the difference is kind of the point. I don't know."

"Here I was hoping the ambiguity wasn't alt-proof."

"If the thing Sibyl wants is 'have your wellbeing depend on my actions in ways that don't even leave me more certain if whether it's really you" then that will be really hard."

"Well, wouldn't have phrased it that way but I suppose it boils down to that. She wants to be able to take care of her. The roles thing has a failure mode she's heavily acculturated to avoid, she doesn't want to just blunder around not taking her girlfriend's needs into account because people in Eclipse are often naively inclined to do that and it's terrible, and Dream's too shut down to get a read on but she can't just tell her to act normal because that would not be letting her do the thing either, especially since your whole template is too good at lying..."

"Impression I get is that my alt is trying very very hard not to be misleading. Except about what she wants, which to the extent she's let herself figure out at all she is trying to be very misleading indeed about."

"Sibyl might be able to settle for alt consults but the setups were different enough I'm not sure how far she should trust them."

"I suppose it doesn't help at all that making Sibyl happy really is most of what she'd want -"

"Not really. It kind of takes narrow circumstances for that to work - like, I could respond usefully to Aydanci being fixated on my being happy when he found out I'd reincarnated, but Aydanci himself was fine except for the sole fact of having spent eighteen years thinking I was gone forever so this mostly involved doing whatever I was doing anyway this time with him around."

"I was hoping the two of them could just occupy themselves fixing things up."

"They're apparently not busy enough. Being busy would not fix this problem but it might spread it out, I guess, long enough to let Dream do whatever she needs to do."

"What advice did you give -"

"Mostly I listened to her vent and apologized for not having quite exactly enough been-there-done-that to give her specific instructions."

"I'll talk with my alt."

"If you tell her to act normally then this doesn't actually solve Sibyl's problem, you know."

"Yeah. I don't know a better way for us to figure out preferences, after, than pretending we have them."

Sigh. Hug.