Uh.

<...hello?>

🎵 maybe it will go away on its oooooown 🎶

🎶 that's one of the shortest fragments he's ever experienced it speakiiiiing, skill be with hiiiiim 🎵

yyyyYes Andor's door is open! Fifteen minutes left, he's barely sweaty, and no one on the way noticed anything weird about the way he was running! "Sir?"

Why walk when you can run? A few broken bones per lifetime due to the natural clumsiness common to all primates who have just undergone breakneck neural evolution is hardly bad enough that you should waste minutes per day in order to avoid it! We fly carplanes despite the risk, don't we?

". . . Yes?"

Ah balls Andor probably doesn't remember him make it quick make it quick

"I am

having a weird - perceptual experience that might be of interest to you if you could spare literally ten minutes? I think I could pay enough to make it worth your time."

<...could you, I don't know, look at your hand and wiggle the index finger or something if you can hear me? I'm starting to worry that maybe the comm's broken.

--wait, hang on, is this about me?>

One of the other things that helps is not feeding the delusion in the privacy of your own mind, if possible, even as you talk up its reality to other people. He hasn't actually had a fear-hallucination this dramatically affecting in ten years, but the correct response is, nonetheless, ingrained reflex.

"- Sure, I don't expect any referrals from the juniors in the next ten minutes, though I'll have to kick you if someone does come." He names a price, invites Xakda in, asks what's wrong. A mini-contract for the one-off service is written, copied, signed.

"- so - this morning, there was - I don't know if there are any cases of schizophrenia or DID that are like this, but -" you idiot don't start babbling self-diagnoses based on zero actual research "- I woke up, and there was just - immediately this, like, partition in my mind, apparently with a totally separate personality, and name, and history - claiming to be from another world - memories that I couldn't access unless - it, or he - spoke, directly, using my voice, and I just kind of took it in stride as, okay, you must be from another world, then, this is obviously real, has to be -" strained laugh "- 'less it disappears when I get to work or something, and then it did, and it came back when I was alone, and it's back now."

"- could you summarize that again?" He's writing.

--any cases of what now--

--that-- it--

--that word that Xakda used when first talking to Sinber, what was it, "insane", that had connotations of both "delirious" and "neurodivergent"--

--and it turns out these people have a word specifically for people who are stuck in delirium, long term, and it's not like it's a word for talking about speculative fiction because Xakda is talking like it's a live possibility--

--if, somehow, that is a thing people can have here (are their souls more firmly attached to their brains or something?? is that a thing he can have now?)...

...then he's not going to be able to convince Xakda he's real by waiting a week and pointing out that they're both still alive.

He's in the really deep shit after all, isn't he.

He desperately wishes he had braked at that fucking intersection.

<You-- you asked me to play really-dead, so I did-->

He sighs, audible over the comm.

<...should I talk to him too?>

It's not quite the time in the interview, yet, for that -

He takes out a notebook and "doodles" (covertly writes where Minaiyu can see) - suddenly the room tilts, he's experiencing world-double-vision, treating Minaiyu as simultaneously real and not-real and it threatens to overheat his mind - while he summarizes haltingly for Andor, he writes

not yet

in a minute please

thanks

if you're real SORRY

He establishes that Xakda is oriented to place, time, person, establishes that Xakda is not confessing about any history of recent trauma or prodromal symptoms, does a series of syntactic-logic tests that usually definitively turn up psychotic thought patterns and a few that should be sufficient to detect the kind of cognitive disruption he imagines would be associated with hyper-abrupt DID, and it all comes out clean.

He doesn't tell Xakda so, not right away in case Xakda is in a delicate state and it makes something worse, but Andor, senior diagnostic neurologist of Sain, Pyeth, Gahai, notices he is confused.

"- you say the alternate personality is able to speak and make motions on your behalf - can you control when that happens?"

Their ten minutes is almost up, but, obviously, Andor will advise Xakda to come see him or somebody similar after his shift or on a day off, since apparently whatever this is he's been able to work through it so far.

"- yeah, actually, earlier in this conversation - he - was asking if he could. Talk. To you. Um. Do you want to have that happen with the remaining minute.

I don't anticipate debilitating problems from this based on how it's gone before?"

"- Sure." What in the name of Lesel is happening here.

On his notebook:

you're good to go now if you want

"Of Alternate - what has this morning been like from your perspective?"

"- Minaiyu. His name's Minaiyu."

"- Minaiyu, then."

Well. He's glad that him being real is also a live possibility in Xakda's mind. He got a sapient pronoun this time and everything.

He walks through the door.

"So-- I was in a vehicle crash, a fatal one, and when I woke up I was in Xakda's body. That-- that's not outside-context, for me, that's a known way death works where I'm from, we get a couple hundred dead people turning up every year-- I wasn't expecting it today, though.

Uh, anyway-- I introduced myself, explained the situation--found out y'all had never heard of this--we, we talked, about my life back home, some of the ways things are different here--

--I sang for him, a poem he'd never heard, in a language he hadn't known existed yesterday. I could teach people to speak it, given time. I know a lot more songs. There's a mnemonic one about the periodic table, if y'all don't know you might end up stranded on another world one day with nothing but the contents of your mind then-- then Xakda probably never had cause to memorise the periodic table, there-- there's probably other stuff like that, things that would be the same, that you could check, that I know and he doesn't..."

". . . Do you mind if I record you singing the mnemonic song about the periodic table now?"

It's possible Xakda made it up and then subconsciously invented an alternate story about it, but severe acute mental breaks usually don't end up memory-entangled with carefully self-composed lyrics that rhyme and scan and also correspond whimsically to the chemical elements. When Andor hears the way in which this song falls apart, or looks it up and finds its true author, or hears Minaiyu's particular excuses for not being able to sing it, he'll be able to better advise Xakda what to do next.

"Well, it takes a while--maybe ten minutes?--but if Xakda can find the time I'd love to, and if not now then whenever he gets a chance.

Uh, Xakda, what do you think? Can we at least squeeze in a verse or two?"

"Yes by all means please! I don't think he needs the whole song just enough data to be implausible as something I catshat for this purpose?"

"- yes."

He knows it's evil to have less fun as a diagnostic tech when the patient knows exactly what you're doing, but nevertheless, this is a lot less fun when the patient knows exactly what you're doing.

Once Andor has the recorder set up, Minaiyu sings the first four verses of the periodic-table song (an introductory verse and couplets for each of the first six elements).

Andor can't understand the lyrics, but it does rhyme and scan, and (to whatever extent Andor can tell) the phoneme patterns are suggestive of an actual language rather than a string of nonsense sounds.

(Minaiyu wonders, as he sings, what it's like for Xakda. It must be so strange, to feel your own mouth fluently shaping the syllables of a language you don't speak. Yes, Minaiyu has also spent a fair bit of time today feeling someone else speak a foreign language through his mouth, but he's pretty sure it's a different kind of weird when you can understand what they're saying.)

When Minaiyu finishes singing, he flips Xakda's notebook to a blank page and writes out a translation. He translates a couple bits of jargon literally for lack of better options, and Xakda doesn't seem to know the local words for elements 3, 4, or 5 so Minaiyu gives those in transliterated Tashayan (but those couplets sure do sound like descriptions of lithium, beryllium, and boron).

He thinks for a moment, then turns another page and writes a list of all 94 elements, in order, using local words where they come when he calls for them and Tashayan words plus a couple of distinguishing characteristics otherwise.