<Anytime.>

...So what can you learn from thoroughly filtered information? Maybe you can learn what the people filtering your information want you to believe - if they can read your mind, then that's probably just whatever you do believe, if you believe anything - right? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they're incompetent and don't get the results they want.

Maybe something you can still say is that things that have happened before are likely to happen again, at least if you're careful not to make any other inferences - something really simple like "my subjective sense of how my body felt yesterday was that I had ten fingers, and that's been true a lot of the time, and when it's stopped being true for a while it's started being true again, so I think tomorrow I will feel like I have ten fingers" seems basically reasonable. It does seem like the experience of how many fingers he feels like he has isn't random, at least if his memory is at all trustworthy. If he had somehow done a better job of timekeeping he would know something useful about it like "on thirty thousand days I have perceived myself having ten fingers and on seven thousand I haven't" and then he could say tomorrow's odds are 30:7. That logic seems applicable even in cases where someone wants to convince you you can trust something so you'll be taken by surprise when it turns out you can't: if someone tells a thousand truths so you'll believe them when they lie, they still tell a thousand truths and one lie.

He mostly doesn't pay attention to the episode with the factory but the one after it is... interesting. Everyone on this show has such a comfortable time being taught things and this one goes into more depth about that than most episodes and has such a notably pleasant relationship between teacher and student - they're all notably pleasant, but he's encountered a couple of teachers who are about as gentle as Pakku, and of course Toph isn't in a position to exercise authority as a teacher at all, and so Piandao still stands out.

He doesn't, actually, think it'd be surprising or unlikely if it were easy to teach people more effectively and more gently than he's experienced.  He shouldn't be sure but - that's one of the things that eventually led to him catching on, that the demons were demons. (Probably.) He wonders if good teaching is like good math, and once you see it you can tell it's good just by thinking about it. Probably not. It feels like it should work that way, though, and it feels like it's clear that Piandao is a good teacher.

(He wishes he'd independently come up with the idea of not hurting your students.)

The next day Atsinni signs up for an embroidery class at the craft store.

Huh, they still do embroidery by hand these days? Weird.

Apparently!

They have to go to the Pool today, too, before lunch.

Ugh. At least he's tired enough to sleep through it.

(Insofar as anything can possibly count as relaxing, being very obviously not expected to do anything and very obviously satisfactorily miserable is relaxing, or at least not a situation where he's used to being punished for trying to sleep. Other people nearby screaming makes it harder, a lot harder, but not impossible.)

Atsinni doesn't gag him this time; he can catch some microsleep in one of the cells while he's catching rays and then get escorted back to receive him again.

That... is an opening and he's absolutely not ready for it and he has no idea what to do with it and he hates himself for that.

Is it at least reasonable to think if Atsinni left him an opening that soon it's likely to happen again soon? Maybe. Hard to say. He contemplates that afterward.

<Well I'm not going to do it if I think you'll get me killed!>

<That's very understandable. I don't want you to go to Hell. It seems like the fact that neither of us wants that should let us work together in a less adversarial way than this but I admit I'm not really sure how.> It would be obvious if he weren't a total failure as a person, he thinks, but he is and it isn't.

<All you have to do is plan not to tell people anything or show them anything that'd be a problem.>

okay but the last people who wanted him to do or not do things were trying to maximize torture

<Is this symmetrical with "all you have to do is - "> He can't actually bring himself to put words to it but there sure is exactly one thing he's selfishly upset about in their relationship and it's not like Atsinni doesn't already know what it is.

<I am in fact nonzero worried that skipping meals will get me killed. Not sleeping affects how you are to handle and not eating wouldn't help, on top of how conspicuous it could be - nobody is watching me now as far as I know to make sure I'm at the food court every day but if I start acting weird or your stomach growls at the wrong moment or something they might start paying attention.>

And he's nonzero worried that Atsinni isn't behaving in the way that best minimizes the number of people in Hell, so maybe it is symmetrical, and maybe that doesn't get them anywhere, or maybe at best it gets them as far as having empathy for each other.

(He... accepts Atsinni's reasoning, in the sense that he can't really argue that he knows better, but it doesn't feel like the sort of reasoning that was very careful or weighed his well-being very highly or took more than two minutes.)

<I'm weighing your well-being, I'm not, like, a sadist, but I'm not going to just suddenly hard juke left and do whatever looks like it might minimize damned souls! I don't even know what that would be but it's probably not me being dead!>

<I'm also not sure, or I would have explained it to you in detail already and be badgering you about it constantly, but I think... so, it matters if you go to Hell, and besides that it matters if I get to the point where I can actually come up with a good plan, and if I can it matters whether you get in my way.> He expects Atsinni to get in his way, at that point, because Atsinni seems to care about having fun, not about avoiding pain - he's not articulating this part in words, or even thinking it over, or he'd conclude he shouldn't be confident about it, but he implicitly thinks Atsinni is indifferent between going to Hell, ceasing to exist, and going back to the Pool forever. <Because - I guess - I've been thinking that if you want something, like having fun, you'll use all the power you have to hurt other people very badly, because it would be a really weird coincidence if, for example, making other people happy were the best way to have more fun. Even if you personally don't find cruelty fun.> He's concerned that this means he can never ever have any fun because all fun tortures people. <Also I think you keep conflating the obviously completely justified fact that you aren't prioritizing my well-being and the different> (unjustified and egregiously evil) (or maybe it's fine, how would he know) <fact that you aren't trying to do anything about Hell. It's not like prioritizing my well-being is very likely to be a good strategy for that. If you wanted me to be okay that would be really simple, or maybe it would get you killed, whatever, either way you wouldn't need to do anything about everyone else, and if you did somehow destroy Hell it wouldn't make me happy.> (He's not entirely right about that but he's not doing deep introspection about it right now.)

<I don't know how to destroy Hell! I don't know how to find out how to destroy Hell! I don't know how to make progress on figuring out what would be a good strategy for learning how to destroy Hell! If the opportunity presents itself, sure, let's destroy Hell, but I don't see any reason to expect that to happen.>

<It'll take some doing but my memories wouldn't make more sense if demons could read minds, if they could control minds, if they could control other people's bodies directly, or if they could achieve all their goals on their own without help. If that happened my memories would make less sense.> He could contemplate specific examples but that doesn't really seem to be the point. <I don't know how to get there without their help, I don't know if they can be injured, I don't know if there's a fixed number of them. I bet all of these problems are solvable if we just do some research and think about it for a decade, only I don't know how to do research so I need to think about that for a decade first. You seem really confident that you understand the world around you and how to make plans, so it'd probably go faster for you.>

<I understand the parts of the world I'm familiar with! None of which include any way to make inroads on traveling to or influencing Hell, let alone without making it a worse-than-suicide mission.>

<So I don't really know enough that you should listen to me, my ideas are probably terrible, but the terrible ideas that have occurred to me so far are trying to get recaptured, trying to impersonate someone else that they'd trust more, kidnapping other people they send here and making demands, checking that they're not just underground somewhere we could tunnel to, getting people who don't kind of suck as people to pray in case that helps - I assume there's no help coming but I guess I don't really know - or maybe other people would have ideas, or maybe the way they send people back and forth is actually learnable, or maybe it isn't but we could trick one into helping, or maybe we could talk one into defecting, or, uh, anyway I don't actually know and those ideas are probably terrible, you're right.>

<Getting people to pray sounds at least not very dangerous? I don't know how to do it but it doesn't sound like it involves attracting demon or Imperial attention which is a great start.>

Mental shrug. <I think most of what I know about it I learned before dying, which I guess doesn't prove that it really works that way. It - doesn't seem like my prayers since then have gotten me anything but maybe that was because of being in Hell rather than because of anything about me. Or because it doesn't work at all. Or something.> He finds the topic intensely painful, though of course that puts it in company with a lot of other topics.

<It seems like the kind of thing you should be able to do while I'm going about my business, if you want?>

<It's possible that'd work but there's a reason to think I specifically might not be able to do it successfully, there's some reason it's never worked for me before.> Also he hates the idea and doesn't want to think about why.

<I can probably find some sort of church but there are at least three different kinds just on the bus route we take.>