Leareth was curled up in his bed reviewing notes and now he is suddenly being EATEN by a GIANT SNAKE. The amount of sense this makes is well into negative numbers and -

- okay probably this is the "jumpscare" variant of nightmare that makes more sense than the alternative and the action to do about it is 'try to wake up' -

This does not work at all, and by that point it's too late to try alternative plans like 'Mindspeak Vanyel and Maitimo as loudly as he possibly can'. Inconveniently this is a situation where 'try to fight back' might ACTUALLY HELP but he's also too frozen to think of that until it's too late to make much difference, so he doesn't bother. 

Weirdly, being eaten by a giant snake doesn't actually hurt? And doesn't seem to result in the expected consequence of "being eaten." 

Instead he's...somewhere else...?

Also, in midair and falling. 

"--Whoah!" she says, not letting go of the bag but reaching out to catch the falling stranger. She checks that all her lines are still taut--yes--did some Seeker push a guy down a well but not sabotage her lines or do anything to her assistant?

Whatever, not important right now. Her legs bend as she catches him, but it's only to help cushion his fall, not because she isn't strong enough to support him. 

They are at the apparent bottom of a stone well, just Leareth, the glowing woman who caught him, and the muck she's standing in, out of which are poking some suspicious-looking white objects. 

Screaming would ALSO have plausibly been useful when he was being eaten by a giant snake, but apparently Leareth has a lot of engrained habits about making zero noise while bad things happen, and they aren't very responsive to whether this is helpful. 

Screaming now probably isn't helpful but is pointlessly tempting. Leareth manages to restrain it to a strangled sort of eeeeeeeep sound. 

Why is she glowing. He belatedly thinks to stretch out his mage-sight. When startled he still sometimes forgets he has it; for a long time he didn't. 

She is VERY VERY VERY MAGIC. 

She is also saying something querulous in a language he doesn't understand. 

Leareth instinctively tries to flail his way loose and get further away from the VERY VERY VERY MAGIC until he can figure out what's going on, before his conscious mind has a chance to think through whether this is in any way a good idea. 

She's very strong. He does not succeed in flailing his way loose. 

If he cares to continue looking around, the well they are in is also very magic, but her magic--her glowing, actually--is suppressing it. 

Leareth struggles for about five seconds, until it's apparent that this won't work, and then goes completely limp. He does manage, a few seconds after that, to keep looking around and notice the various other magic and her apparent magic-suppressing effect. 

He still can't understand what she's saying. Again, it takes a long time to remember that Mindspeech exists. 

- okay the FIRST thing to do is to try Broadsending as loud a mental shout as he can for Maitimo and/or Vanyel. 

She tilts her head quizzically. 

She...definitely did not hear that with her ears. And his lips didn't move. So...

Her signal-line jerks in the coded pattern for a status update request. She signals back proceed as normal. 

That didn't work either. 

Leareth is at this point utterly terrified, and it's tempting to respond to this by just not doing any things, but - probably - maybe??? - this is a situation where trying to do things will make things go better instead of worse. Also he's confused and he hates that. 

:Where am I: he tries asking the glowing magic woman, much less loudly and actually targeted-Mindspeech this time. He tries to open his Thoughtsensing just enough to get only the top surface thoughts; that should let him understand her answer. 

"At the bottom of a well in London," she says. 

Her thoughts carry the pattern of the words she says aloud, but underneath them are other words, more complicated ones; the word that corresponds to "at the bottom of a well" also carries connotations of "in the maw of a hungry beast" and "in the shadow of a cursed god." The word that corresponds to "London" also means "Fifth City" and "Stolen Capital."

None of this is at all familiar, and neither "in the maw of a hungry beast" nor "in the shadow of a cursed god" are places he wants to be at ALL. 

At some point he's going to have to try to form some coherent thoughts about what just happened and where he is, but maybe that can wait until he's definitely not in mortal danger. 

There are...probably...actions he could take about the mortal danger? Other than just staying motionless and waiting to see what magic glowing woman is going to do with him? 

He could - climb the rope? That seems hard and exhausting though and he's likely to just fall again. 

He could try more communication. The woman is baffling but she doesn't seem hostile. 

:Is it dangerous: he asks her. :Can we leave: His mindvoice is remarkably level and coherent given the amount of barely-restrained panic just underneath. 

"It is dangerous, but not very dangerous. Probably. Hm. Well, I'm not leaving without doing what I came here for, but...no, sending you up without me wouldn't be safe either, my light doesn't reach the top of the well at enough strength to keep Mr. Eaten away...I'm sorry, I think it's probably safest if you just wait with me until I'm done."

An assessment of risks weighed and deemed worthy. An uncertainty due to a new variable. The possibility of a third option. The rejection of an idea before it can be fully formed. Light that is law. An incredibly dangerous being whose existence is unlawful. That which is devoured. Compassion in the face of a reasonable fear. Determination to carry through an unpleasant task. 

She sets him down and begins digging human bones out of the muck and stuffing them in her bag. 

Leareth tries to curl into a position where he's as minimally encumbering to her as possible. And then spends a while with his eyes closed, putting most of his willpower into not crying. 

He's in another world. Again. That much is pretty clear; none of the magic is familiar at all. 

This time he has no way back. He can't do magic. Even if he could solve that, eventually, he has no idea where to start; he didn't even see what the snake did, because he panicked and forgot mage-sight existed. 

Okay. Fine. Trapped in another world where glowing magical women inexplicably go on missions to dig human bones out of the bottom of wells, which are maybe metaphorical - no, 'metaphor' isn't the right concept at all - which are somehow related to hungry beasts and/or cursed gods. 

(He is going to try very hard to not-think about "Mr. Eaten" so he can avoid panicking any more, since it would do the opposite of help right now.) 

Instead, he collects himself enough to open his eyes and actually watch what she's doing, with both his ordinary eyes and mage-sight. And, come to think of it, does anything else in here show up to Thoughtsensing? 

The woman's light is relatively straightforward: it is enforcing a paradigm, and the paradigm does not include evil magic wells. The magic that makes up the woman is significantly more complicated. 

The well is ALIVE (or at least AWARE) and ANGRY. It hurts to be in contact with. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Leareth withdraws his mental probe as fast as possible. He really, really doesn't want the beast/cursed god/Mr. Eaten to be any more aware that he's here. 

It seems unlikely, probably the best he can do here is avoid being actively in the way, but - 

:Can I help you with anything?: he asks the woman. Maybe if so they can leave SOONER. 

"Sure, help me dig these out. We can't get all of them but I'm going to fill this bag." 

Agreement that speed is desirable. Determination to rescue the victims of the angry god. Determined starfish-throwing in the face of a daunting, currently insurmountable task. 

...Leareth likes her, he decides. Or - respects, approves, it's more complicated and real than just liking. She's...fighting for something. 

Leareth was fighting for something, once, when it was - safe, for the world, for anyone, for himself... It's only words, now. All the people in all the worlds. But, whatever her something is, it's more than words to her. 

Having feelings about it isn't productive, right now. Leareth does his best to stomp on them, and focuses on helping her scoop human bones out of mud; he's not as strong or as magic as her, but at least he's not squeamish about the task, and having something useful to do with his hands is a good distraction. 

Eventually, the bag is full, and she grabs both it and him tightly and yanks on the signal-cord to tell her assistant to pull her up. 

The man pulling on her ropes is a slightly sweaty academic in tweed with patches. He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief once she and Leareth and the bag are all safely out and Lucy is untying herself. She dims as they reach the top and stops glowing entirely as soon as they're all out.

"Who's this?" he asks her, nodding at Leareth. 

"--He fell into the well. You didn't see him?" The expectation that two people would have crossed paths. Startlement at unexpected information. 

"No..."

"Hm." The resolution to investigate a thing in further detail later. 

She opens the bag and the two of them start taking the bones out and laying them on the ground. 

And then she speaks one of the complicated words that have been going through her mind all this time. The reunion of violently disjointed parts. 

The magic in the word almost seems to burn against his mage-sight, as several skeletons assemble themselves out of the loose bones. Not complete ones--not a one of them is fully complete--but every bone is lined up with every other bone from the same body. 

And then something in her magic shifts, clicking from one setting to another, and she begins glowing again, but this light is different. This light does not enforce a paradigm, or if it does, it is a very different one: Everybody lives. She glows far more brightly here than she did in the well

The bones grow flesh and organs and skin. Minds flicker to life in their skulls. They open their eyes and breathe and sit up and look around. A few cover their nakedness, a few break down crying. 

What. 

Leareth has been spending the last however-long trying not to have any emotions, and now everything feels far away - like it's happening, but not really to him. 

The sight of bones, some of which he pulled out of the well himself, assembling into living people, still has an impact, but mostly he just feels - dizzy, like he's falling, detached from anything that holds together. 

:Are we safe here: he tries to ask the woman. His mindvoice is noticeably less coherent than before. 

"Uh, define safe?" The uncertainty that anything is ever truly safe. "Mr. Eaten can't get to us outside of the well." An angry god, bound in the prison of its own death. "A Seeker could push us in but they're not going to try that in public while there are people around." The danger posed by the cultists of an angry god. The safety granted by visibility. "A knife-and-candle player could stab us but I could fix that." The frustrating homicidality that some adopt in the face of limited immortality. "Safe enough. I could find safer, depending on what you're scared of." The tradeoff between security and convenience. The willingness to sacrifice greater convenience for another's security than for her own. The uncertainty as to the source of fear. The fact that any place guarded by a force great enough to deter attack may thence feel threatening from the inside. 

There are a lot of things Leareth meant to ask her. How the well acquired an angry mind-presence; how pulling the bones out and reanimating them helps; what her magic is, both kinds, and what magic the god has, and a thousand other questions, and also he should at some point tell her that he's not from this world, it's relevant context... 

Leareth has been trying very hard not to consider the actually-extremely-obvious hypothesis, which is that he's still in Angband. At this point he sort of has to actually think about it, though. Or...try. 

:I - may I please have a moment: he says to the woman, very politely, and then he curls up in a ball on the ground. 

"Of course." The axiomatic assertion that sometimes people need a minute especially in stressful circumstances. 

She and the Tweed Neophilologist start distributing clothing to the newly-resurrected people and reassuring them.

Okay. Start with what he knows. Might know. There's...nonzero evidence here that actually he's still in the situation where he can't know anything ever again. But it's not like he was absolutely sure before. Just...sure enough. 

How much does this change that. Is he still sure enough.

It's been a subjective year. Or - he thought so, at the time. He has - had - a year's worth of notes to prove it, but not here. A lot of events happened and he's pretty sure he remembers them, along with a lot of very samey days and nights that are nonetheless stubbornly seared into his memory, he was hoping that would eventually make the things that came before this past year less salient.

If Melkor had figured out how to replicate compulsions and Mindhealing, the war would've been over in a week. It's...not impossible, that everything since then was some sort of elaborate game, but - it's not the sort of explanation that actually leaves him less confused?

He is not, currently, being tortured. The situation was baffling and scary but - not in a very targeted-at-him way? Plausibly it was less frightening for him than it would have been for, say, Herald Dara? It's, in a way, more surreal and confusing than frightening. 

Also he's not being asked to do any magic, and he couldn't anyway. 

Fine. Start with that.

If glowing-woman asks him to do magic, or anything else that could have genuine significant effects on the world, he'll refuse and update his probability estimate of still-in-Angband. (On reflection, helping her collect bones was...probably still okay? She was already doing it, he just made the process 20% faster, and he was the one who offered at all.) 

As soon as he has more downtime, he'll check his memories of the last year, make sure they actually do contain a year's worth of real details. 

In the meantime, he will - hold his beliefs about what's happening lightly, but will continue to act on the assumption that this is real and worth updating on.