:Thank you. One moment: 

Leareth sits down, props his elbows on his knees and cups his face in both hands and tries to block out everything for a moment and calm down. He can get...part of the way to calm. And he is tired, but it's - hopefully - going to be easier to relax once he has enough context on this place to even form a model about what's going to happen in the next few hours. 

:I have many questions: he says to Lucy. :Could I - have something to write on, to keep track?: 

She nods, and produces a notebook and pen from a pocket in her skirt. 

:Thank you. I need a couple of minutes: 

He takes notes, in rapid shorthand; his hands are shaky, but at this point Leareth is used to trying to take notes in the middle of a panic attack, and he's adapted his penmanship a bit so it's still legible despite this. The process of writing things down is - not quite soothing, but it does make him feel steadier, like there's definitely solid ground under him. 

(He wants a HUG but that isn't happening right now so he acknowledges the want and lets it drift past and keeps writing.) 

:All right. I - where to start - how long have there been these sun gods, 'Judgements' - did they create humans like you or vice versa?: 

"Judgments came first, but they didn't create humans. Humans evolved independently. Also, I'm only half-human." 

The extreme timelines that the Judgments and their servants operate on. The classification of 'animals' as a category low on the Great Chain composed of beings who came about through the process of natural selection. The crime of amalgamy: cross-breeding between different species. 

:- What, can these...god beings...interbreed with evolved humans? How does that work, biologically speaking?: 

"My father isn't a Judgment, my father is the Mountain of Light." The great Mountain of the Elder Continent who created the Light that is Life. "I don't know how it worked, uh, anatomically speaking." The extreme disinclination to speculate on the topic of one's parents having sex. "I could probably work it out with a human partner who wanted to experiment with my natural form, but so far I haven't had any lovers at all." An experiment, theoretically considered but never executed. A life too busy to bother with casual liaisons. A lack of extremely desirable romantic prospects. 

:...Wait, can you shapeshift?: 

"Yes. Just between this form and my natural one and in-between." The capacity to imitate a part of one's ancestry. 

That does not seem like it should work at ALL but...clearly a lot of things here are different, down to the level of fundamental physical laws. 

Leareth spends a minute trying to organize his remaining confusion into categories, and not making that much progress. 

:...Can you tell me how magic here works? Sorry, I know that is unspecific, just - my world also has magic and it is very different and I am not sure where to start with questions about yours: 

"Well, there's lots of magic," she says thoughtfully. "And I don't understand it all myself. There's light, and the Correspondence, and Parabola, and all the different kinds of people--the Axiles, the Devils, the Curators..." 

An extreme diversity of ways to act upon the world, most of which are suppressed by law-light. The admission that one is very young and a relative neophyte. The light emitted by celestial beings, law and life and hypothetical other forms. The burning language of the stars, which can force its meaning upon the world. The world of mirrors and dreams. A vast diversity of kinds of person. The aquatic beings of the planet Axile: giant sea urchins and strange glowing insects that cling to the roof of the Neath and human-sized squid people. Egg-thieves. Batlike beings which take special interest in collecting certain items. 

Leareth tries to keep up in his notes, flipping to new pages and marking out shorthand headers to be filled in later when he understands more. 

:Can you explain 'law light' more?: 

"The Judgments have a consensus about how reality should work, and Law-Light enforces it. In the absence of a stronger, conflicting light, anyway. That consensus excludes just about any magic besides the magic of the Judgments and Judgment-approved agents such as Messengers." 

The consensus reality law of the Judgments, as separate from the not-metaphysically enforced laws which govern the behavior of the Judgments themselves. The power of celestial light, which infects all light. The many and varied wonders of the Neath, which evaporate on the surface. 

:Ah. Thank you: Leareth isn't sure he fully understands, but he's run out of specific questions to ask, at this point he's bottlenecked on having time and some peace and quiet to process all the new information.

Which he should probably...ask for? This is a nervewracking prospect, though, for no reason for the usual, expected reason, which is that he still has a lot of instincts pointed toward 'when overwhelmed, stop trying to influence the world in any way.'

Also he still feels very disoriented, but it's unclear if this is a feeling where more information would help, or just the predictable emotional response to 'unexpectedly being eaten by a snake and ending up in a bizarre different world.' 

:Do you have questions about me or my world: he pushes out eventually. 

"What's your magic like? What are your gods like? What are the biggest problems people face?"

The nebulous, unknown shape of a potential resource. Wary interest in powerful factions. Perusal of low-hanging fruit for helping people. 

....Can he talk about gods right now. It's unclear whether he can manage to do that. 

Start with magic, then. There's a lot to cover there and he's given explanations of it in the last year so he has some scripts to run off. He can spend a while explaining Velgarth's various Gifts and what they do.  

"That's a lot more...structured and consistent than I'm used to," she says thoughtfully. 

The contrast between a neatly ordered set as exemplified by a garden versus an apparent chaos as exemplified by a field of wild flowers.

:It seems so. In your world, there is - contrast, tension, between physical-law-as-enforced-by-Judgements, and...most of your forms of magic? Velgarth does not have that. Magic is just one of the ways that our physical laws work: 

Leareth isn't sure how long it's been since he landed on top of her in the weird angry-dead-god-well, but he's starting to feel vaguely lightheaded and woozy. And - oh, right, when he actually takes a moment to check what sensations are happening in his body, which he's been trying hard to ignore because it's mostly 'panic', he is INCREDIBLY thirsty. Plausibly he would be hungry too, except that he's spent multiple hours running on adrenaline and mostly he just feels sick to his stomach.

...Also, inconveniently, he's extremely exhausted and his emotions are doing the thing where they declares he's BANNED from making any explicit requests because his plans might be wrong in some unspecified way that will destroy everything somehow. This is frustrating and pointless but he's too out of willpower to override it. 

:I think I - would benefit - from having something to eat and drink and then some time to rest: There, that is not a request it's just a statement and so it's allowed. 

"Oh--of course, I'll be right back."

Embarrassment at not having realized something obvious. 

She rises and leaves the room. 

With one fewer distraction around, Leareth scans the surroundings again with mage-sight, checks his own shields - still up at full power - and then -

PANICPANICPANICPANICPANIC this is so incredibly stupid It's very predictable, actually, he knows what to do about this. 

Unfortunately the usual 'what to do about this' is to ask Maitimo to come hold him and sing to him, or if he's busy ask Vanyel to come and just do the singing part, and he can't do either of those things ever again and he's shockingly miserable about this. 

It often helps get this over with faster if he stops trying to suppress externally-visible physical reactions, which seems acceptable now since Lucy isn't here, so he spends a while shaking and hyperventilating and not trying to force his mind or body to do anything else.

He keeps his Thoughtsensing extended so that he'll have some warning if Lucy is about to get back. 

Lucy comes back several minutes later, carrying a tray with a plate of food (heavy on mushrooms) and a bottle of water and a bottle of some kind of alcohol. 

This is enough warning that Leareth has time to mostly control his breathing, though he's still pretty shaky. 

:Thank you: He accepts the tray of food with his best attempt at a grateful smile, and starts off by gulping most of the water in one go. 

"You look really tired. Should I come back later?"

Concern, of the form: wishing to avoid overtaxing another's resources.

Aaaaaaaaaaah it's terrible being asked QUESTIONS about his PREFERENCES when he feels like this.

:...If there is nothing else urgent to address, then - yes, I would appreciate that: 

"Okay. You'll be safe here." 

Acquiescence to a course of action. Assurance of security. 

She scribbles a map indicating directions between here and where to get food and then leaves. 

Leareth finishes his water, which is maybe a questionable plan; he spends a while holding still and taking deep breaths until he feels less like throwing up, and then picks his way through about half of the food while he tries to think. 

First priority, piece together an actual model of this world so he can– no, stop. Before that. 

Priority one: sort out his internal priors around the question of 'still in Angband, yes/no', and then he can decide whether it's even worth trying to have beliefs about reality. 

This is inconveniently hard to reason about, because his instincts have some very strong, and conflicting, opinions on it. Five years' worth of "not even worth trying to assess, assume still in Angband" and a more-recent but less-total-time year of redirects toward the various arguments against, which are more or less convincing at various times but he tends to fall back on the thing where no one is asking him to do things and that lowers the stakes. Or he stops trying to do reasoning about it and just obtains hugs until his brain stops screaming. 

Not an option, now, but he does have paper. He can do this. Just think about one thing at a time, and write it down, and then it's there... 

Leareth spends a long time methodically going through the past year in his head - and skimming over a lot more of the years-before than he would really prefer, but he has five years worth of memories and they're even mostly in order now and it does seem important data to check whether this whole situation is...at all on-theme...for any of the Melkor rescue hallucinations. 

It's not, really? Melkor doesn't lack creativity but it generally wasn't pointed at 'detailed and very very weird alternate magic systems'. There are a couple of fake-rescue-memories that involved ending up in some third other world, but via accidents with more recognizable-to-Leareth magic than "being eaten by a fucking snake", and they have less random peripheral detail. And - there are rescue memories where supposedly years had passed, but Leareth also remembers going over those with Melody and noting that the 'years of subjective time' were mostly backfilled-and-inserted memories, which might pass muster at a quick glance but aren't convincing otherwise.

In particular, at least according to the supposedly-recovered memories and subsequent processing, Leareth has a cached conclusion that Melkor...never really figured out how to interface with Leareth's internal mnemonic system? Sometimes there would be backfilled record-keeping, but that, too, was never quite convincing.