:It looks like - a little like a kind of transport magic in my world: 

Leareth shivers. Shakes himself a little. 

:I have been trying to think about...what I need, to be less -: Vague handwave. :To be able to do things better. I - think it would help to spend a while, a few days or maybe weeks, somewhere that can - feel like my place? And then I think it will be easier to push through doing things that are stressful, if I know I can go back and recover if I need to: 

"Okay. I assume the Bazaar won't work for that."

:I am not sure. It might? I - I would need more explicit reason to trust the Messenger but I am going to panic about it if I try to interact with them right now. What would the other options be?: 

Expressing preferences is REALLY STRESSFUL and Leareth is curling up again. Having a blanket around him helps. He sort of pulls it half over his head.

"I could...build you a house somewhere outside the city where no one will bother looking? You could stay at my mom's house?"

:What is outside the city like? What kinds of protections does your mother's house have - what is your mother like? I...need a long time to get used to strangers: 

"Mother is kind and good and very open-to-new-experiences. She's hard to knock off balance. My mother's house in particular is guarded by a very large number of very sharp rocks that are very, very hard to traverse safely without at least one of flight, knowing the area very, very well, or being rock-hard oneself. I know the area very, very well, and I still shift into my natural shape to go between London and home. Other places outside the city have comparable dangers-in-the-way or just security through obscurity."

Leareth considers this. 

:All right. I - would like to at least meet your mother, I think? ...It feels stressful but if I imagine talking to friends back in Arda they would say I should not be living somewhere alone: 

He hugs the blanket more tightly. :Also - can you - explain some context to her. I...think it helps, that you know, but I...would really prefer not, not to talk about it again -:

"Yes, I can definitely do that. Fair warning, one of the people I know who's doing worse than you is also staying there right now, it's not literally just her."

:Is that person - doing worse than me in a way where they are likely to behave unpredictably in ways I would find startling?: 

"I don't think so. He doesn't leave his room much."

Nod. :...I am curious what happened to him but you do not have to tell me: 

:Don't spread it around but he was trapped in the body of an immobile snake while suffering from the effects of an agonizing poison he couldn't die from for three thousand years and change. People knew about the snake but not that it was a person and there are people who'd be real interested to know what had happened to him.:

:That is - so awful.... I will not mention it to anyone else. But, no wonder he is doing worse than I am: 

:Yes.:

A singular tragedy as exemplar of a larger clusterfuck.

There isn't, really, anything to say in response. 

...there's something a different Leareth would have said, but that was a long time ago, and when he reaches for it all he can find is disorienting fragments of a shattered tower and a bloodstained sky. 

Lucy wraps up her current batch of scientific inquiry and then:

"Are you alright to walk to the edge of the city, or should I carry you?"

Leareth considers. Tries standing up, gauging his current stamina. 

:- I think I am fine for the walking, if it is - not more than a mile or two - but I am already feeling overwhelmed and I expect that to be difficult. I - sometimes it helps if I am holding someone's hand and just following, it feels less like I am - making any of the relevant decisions: 

He is aware that this is kind of a stupid way for his emotions to work, but he's tested the bounds of it a lot. 

:Okay.:

She takes his hand and leads him through the city, past a carnival, to the edge of a jagged wasteland. 

She starts taking off her clothes. 

...There isn't any sane reason for this to be terrifying and awful, it's not even like it's that closely adjacent to any of the things Sauron did while wearing other people's faces - Lucy doesn't look anything like Vanyel - but it seems he's going to be collapsing to the ground and curling up anyway, that is now the thing that's happening. 

"Um? Are you okay?" she asks, covering herself with her dress without putting it back on. 

Leareth has no idea what 'okay' means. It's stopped seeming like a real word. 

:...Probably not. - can you carry me the rest of the way: 

"Yeah, definitely," she assures him. 

Then she turns into a giant diamond crab. 

"Crab" is maybe not exactly the right word. Her shape is definitely crab-like in many respects. But it's easy to see how if she burrowed into the ground she would look like a smaller, transparent version of the visible parts of the Bazaar. 

Leareth does not observe Lucy's giant crab form because, right now, he has his eyes tightly shut. 

He does extend mage-sight after a little while, since it seems like that could help him feel oriented without risking tripping him into the pit of stupid torturememories. 

Lucy is not only VERY MAGIC but also at the moment VERY BIG. Still smaller than the Bazaar, but compared to a human, very big. 

She picks him up in one of her claws and starts scuttling over the razor-sharp rocks. 

He curls up tightly and hangs onto her claw and feels - surprisingly okay about this? Not safe, exactly, but he's less tense than he would have expected if someone had described this situation to him in the abstract.