He has a wide variety of additional nightmares and one non-nightmare about Atsinni's friends possessing all the demons and taking them clothes shopping.

When they wake up in the morning Atsinni gets up and stretches all the sofa-sleeping kinks out. <Turns out I don't get your dreams except insofar as you remember 'em, which isn't much.>

<Arguably neither do I, I guess. I don't think I can remember ever sleeping that restfully before.> It'd be a good time to try to mull things over, given how many things he needs to rethink and how much sharper his mind feels, but he doesn't really feel like doing that for... at least not for this audience, and he could also unpack that but it'd probably be rude.

Atsinni doesn't comment on that, just sets about fixing breakfast, humming tunelessly in the process.

<You know, you could give things away to different beggars on different days in different places, maybe you wouldn't get caught.>

<No way, pal. You can be three feet to the left the whole time if you want but I am having One Pan Creamy Gnocchi With Artichokes.>

<You're not - > He thinks better of saying anything but that has basically no impact since it's obvious what he was going to say. It was going to be you're not thinking about them at all.

Because it makes sense, of course, that no one should think about what he wants, his desires were optimized malevolently. And it makes sense, too, that he wouldn't be right about whether and when and what to give to the poor, and so there's no specific decision Atsinni could make that he could possibly know enough to judge. But Atsinni explains himself enough that never having mentioned anyone but the two of them or someone threatening them stands out.

<D'you want me to like, find a nice charity, drop a few grand on them? Couple times a week? Diddling human banks is easy, they've got everything on computers but don't know how to make that work right yet, nobody scary'll care.>

What, he's supposed to make decisions now? But he's terrible at -

- fine, Atsinni has strictly more information on literally everything including whether he should make decisions, Atsinni doesn't seem to think that's an obviously stupid idea, so, considerations - is stealing from banks wrong, well, literally everything he knows about morality is suspect and should be thrown out, he really doesn't know what the answer is, just that the right question involves the impact on other people - mostly the thing to do is keep them from going to Hell, and he... should disregard everything he thinks he knows about how people end up there, maybe excepting things he thinks he remembers very vaguely from a very long time ago, which he should instead disregard for being vague memories from a very long time ago.

<I guess if the bankers and their families will starve, then no, unless more people will starve otherwise; and if it's more of a thing where they show off that they have twice as much gold jewelry as some other banker then yes. I think. I'm not sure, I mean, you know more than I do but if it's - if it'd be a good thing to do and you're asking me if I want you to do a good thing then yes and if it's a trick question and it'd be a terrible thing to do then no? I think?>

<I don't know what lifestyle bankers live and I don't wanna do a ton of research about it.> Gnocchi goes in the pan they got from Amazon, and sizzles. Stir stir.

He's not at all confident about whether they should give to charity, whether it actually depends on bankers' lifestyles, or whether it'd be a good use of time to try to become confident about any of that. He not-very-confidently expects Atsinni is a much better person than him.

But he's pretty sure Atsinni decided not to do that research because he doesn't care, not because there's a better thing to do with that time or because Atsinni is actually confident that what they should do doesn't really depend on the answer. He's not judging, exactly. For all he knows Atsinni might be doing the best possible things for everyone in the world. It's not even something that bothers him very much on the scale of things that bother him.

<I don't think I am doing the best possible things for everyone in the world by accident and I'm certainly not doing it on purpose.>

See, he was right, he's not a maximally bad judge of character, you can tell because he was right -

- but why did he have to be right about that.

<Well, I don't think anyone is actually doing that. Sounds fake.>

He wouldn't know. If there were ever any people like that he doesn't recall meeting them, but then, you wouldn't meet them in Hell, would you, and he doesn't have a very good memory either. He doesn't really understand why anyone wouldn't want to try, but as established he is a total idiot and doesn't understand anything.

<I dunno, why would I want to try? It turns out actually I want to eat food and be safe and have eyes.>

It sort of feels like the thing to say to that is so do they but in fact he's against food and indifferent to eyes and can't bring himself to feel like safety is real or could matter, so maybe empathy just doesn't work, who knows. It's just -

- this isn't trustworthy, it's been too long, but he thinks maybe he remembers being okay, some summer a long time ago, and that'll probably never happen again, for him, and he doesn't think he can stop having experiences, and it feels better to have something to get up for, something he can tell himself he's succeeding at - 

- only that intuition might be one he formed when the only mercy was that which was absolutely necessary to let him keep functioning at all, and so having some motivation to keep going seemed very important, because -

- the next thing doesn't come in the vague jumble of concepts and scattered words and images he normally thinks in, and isn't voluntary, and isn't meant as communication. It's just a memory of the worst they ever did, vivid and embodied enough it feels more like rolling back time than like remembering.

He was going somewhere with that but not anymore.

Well, reportedly some hosts just sort of scream epithets at you in their heads all day, and it's kind of a tossup which is preferable - not having tried the epithets thing, admittedly - and the healing factor pushes in favor of keeping this one.

Garlic goes in pan. And artichokes. Wow, garlic smells amazing.

It does smell amazing. Not exactly appetizing but it feels homey and inviting and that's sort of helpful for being in the present moment, which also sucks but notably less.

When the gnocchi is done they are going to eat solidly half of it for breakfast, YUM, and put the rest of it in the fridge for later. Then send more emails about the job expectation situation. Atsinni reports that his host is "23" and in good physical health and probably about 90th percentile cooperative as a stab at a guess and speaks a few languages but has no other special skills. Then he pirates half a gigabyte of random music onto the phone - the Yeerk apartment building has secretly good wifi - and starts dancing around the apartment to random tunes while unpacking delivered packages and putting sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom and so on.

Atsinni kind of... isn't that great, as a person, and is doing things that make other people miserable out of a total lack of concern for their welfare.

Once he settles that in his mind he actually mentally files the gnocchi as torture instead of kind of ironically doing that, and - it's not the least horrible torture he has ever experienced, but it's definitely much less bad than average. He would really rather zero torture, and to be used by someone who does good things instead of bad things, but he'll settle for markedly-less-bad-than-usual torture and being used by someone who isn't literally omnimalevolent. He keeps repeating to himself that this is an improvement and he's glad to be here, as though maybe it'll feel true the thirtieth time.

...He manages to notice very distantly that maybe if he had food preferences gnocchi would be better than lollipops.

<Dude, I'm not trying to torture you! Normal humans are not tortured by eating gnocchi. It's just impossible for me to eat gnocchi without help. Yeerks can't eat, we absorb radiation.>

And that is a much more sympathetic motive than omnimalevolence and that is why he is repeating to himself that he's glad to be here instead of repeating The Song That Never Ends. Whoops, now it's stuck in his head and he's doing that after all.

Atsinni doesn't dignify this with a response.

The reply comes back that they're going to be assigned an undercover security position at a Pool; it'll consist of loitering around a mall, on-call to come by if anything dodgy is up, keeping an eye on things in general in case they are the first to see something dodgy and need to tell everyone. Lots of walking, OK to shop and eat at the food court and whatever during the day as long as they don't make themselves excessively obvious regulars to anybody there. Standard issue fanny-pack-looking-thing that is actually a dracon beam holster will arrive at their address that evening. He'll report to Odshen "Sal Jenkins" 709, who manages the Nordstrom that conceals the entrance to the Pool, but she has a lot on her plate and he shouldn't bother her directly for anything that isn't an obvious crisis unless he gets a second opinion from a co-worker. Shift schedule is thus.

Atsinni gives an acknowledgement and then plays Bejeweled.