Sad Cam talks to Ancora
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She names it.

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Cam sticks a chip in his computer, takes a picture of Judy, runs facial recognition to find the correct videos.

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" - am I good to go for now; I don't really want to - watch, or hang around while you do - "

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"Yeah."

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She heads over to the other side of the main bar area and occupies herself on her phone.

 

The footage shows - from a high angle and somewhat blurrily, in silent grayscale -

- Judy entering the school, mostly done up for prom but still in sneakers, a backpack slung over her shoulder, a touch rounder of face and moving differently than she presently does, waiting around and periodically checking her phone impatiently -

- another girl, in heels and a nicer dress, approaching her -

- them talking, growing angrier at each other -

- the other girl - Sara, presumably - lunging at Judy, knocking her to the ground - the back of her head blocks most of the view but she raises it for a moment to spit out a chunk off to the side -

- Sara pausing at Judy's throat, then sitting up a bit and staring down at her for a prolonged moment - descending again, but with a rather different character to her movement -

- Judy, weakly struggling, saying things at too poor an angle to be discernible by lipreading -

- Sara, running her hand repeatedly down Judy's side, along her ribs, leaning over to leave a trail of kisses down her arm and exposing Judy's newly-holeless neck - though since the video quality's not great there could maybe still be some under all the blood - probably not, given that she ultimately survived it -

- Sara rising after several minutes of continuing in that vein, opening the window, scooping up a shell-shocked and largely unresisting Judy, and climbing outside.

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"Okay," he says, blanking his computer, "I've seen it."

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She comes back over.

"Well?"

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"It looked like you described. I'm sorry that happened to you."

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"Thanks.  Cool.  Now what."

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"I don't really know. Your plan is to stay here and try to find somebody who can help you deal with your planet's mind control related problems, right? And mine is to stay here and find somebody who can resurrect Maiar, even if it's not Ancora. We can, like, coexist, I don't think our respective powers solve each other's problems or anything."

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"Sure.  I mean, you're the one who just got solid evidence that I'm telling the truth, and not the other way around, but operating on your premise: sure."

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"Is there something you want me to do with this information? I'm not threatening to cut you off from your Bar deposit, I don't want you to starve."

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"I appreciate that, I guess.  Could still be - manipulating me into something nefarious, or whatever.  If I'm going to be stuck here indefinitely I'd really prefer to be able to trust you, if trustable you in fact are."  She sighs.  "I'd consider trying to work out something where I offer to just stay here forever - with trackers for enforcement or something - if I could learn summoning, but I don't even know if that would help because I don't know how it works, and you can't tell me, and also so far your guesses about what I'll find convincing are - let's say imperfect."

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"I'm not sure there's much you would find convincing that I can actually produce, but if you want to suggest something be my guest. I don't actually know if summoning will work here at all but that I can have Alassëo check."

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"I can think of some things that'd be convincing about the way your Earth is but I'm not going to say them right now because I'm not allowed to know things about it, and it would only work if you could give me it as soon as I asked instead of having extra time to fake it while knowing what I was going to ask for.  But that only helps if knowing that your Earth is a certain way will then get me far enough to be able to determine that all the other stuff is true, which again I don't want to take your word for because you thought wearing jeans and sneakers was weak evidence instead of exactly zero, given that you could easily have copied them from my Earth, and thought that binding oaths being part of your story made them more likely for some - entirely unclear reason; I didn't get that one tee-bee-aitch."

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"...because Elves can make binding oaths, if you decide that part is credible, you can get Alassëo's oath on anything he corroborates," Cam says, "I didn't realize that was unclear. I don't think I actually had enough information to know that jeans and sneakers would be the thing to copy - I had a portrait of you to guess your age from, but did not know what year it was in your world, and in mine it's the late twenty-second century and both jeans and sneakers are out of fashion, I was just born in 1987. I don't want you to know things about summoning, if you want - anything else to do with my Earth that seems probably safe."

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"No, I mean - so this is the issue, right, you say you only had this much to go off of, but that's the part I don't believe you about; in the case where you're evil and stuff I think you had a lot more.  And I get that binding oaths would fix this if I believed in them, obviously, but before it seemed like you thought I might find them credible specifically because they were part of why you holed the planet, even though I also think that might be made up because it sounds incredibly tailored, for reasons I explained when you told me about it."

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"What do you think hypothetically evil me wants from you?"

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"The entire problem is that I don't know.  - Well not the entire problem, but like, a lot of it."

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"Can I demonstrate that I'm not evil by continuing not to want anything from you?"

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"I mean, it'll help.  Like you said, though, we don't have to be in a hurry, and I think that applies equally to whatever evil-you might want.  And it's not like we can't fill time by trying to make progress on other ways of establishing trust."

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"Well, you're not telling me what those are. Do you need me for something? You seem very invested in this."

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"I will not be convinced by a history book but if they contain little enough information about summoning that I'm allowed to have one then it'll be a solid start to reference stuff against.  And sure, if wanting to know fundamental attributes of the place and people I'm imprisoned in and with makes me very invested, then by all means call me very invested."

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"Summoning becoming common knowledge was a major historical event. I can give you a history book from 2006 or earlier without redacting, or I can redact a later one. You are not imprisoned, you can walk out the door whenever you please, you are self-imposing hermitude out of humanitarian concerns."

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"Ancora already had the ability to kidnap me from my house before having ever met me and is probably - oh whatever, sure, I'll refrain from dying on this hill; I'm very invested in learning about the attributes of my hermitude.  I'll take an aught-six history book for now and if you feel like starting on redacting you could maybe do that, whatever, I'm not your mom."

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