"Oh. I don't think you're under any obligation to go out of your way to help people. I am concerned about your mental health. Having a Yeerk pilot you through behaving in any particular way would probably not improve your mental health, though I guess it's not out of the question."

"I don't think I know what 'mental health' is or why you care about it."

"Mental health is the parts of your brain working together in a way that keeps your mood stable, your beliefs in functional contact with objective reality, and your mind able to cooperate with your goals and responsibilities."

"...I don't really see why you want me to have good mental health when you could just cut all of those things off from my behavior."

"It's sort of folded in to the rest of my job, not just making you easy for other people to be around but making you easy for you to be around, insofar as that's possible. I'm concerned for your well-being."

Sigh. "...Should I give you a list of my preferences since it's not like you can't get them all anyway if you're really just here to hurt me."

"You can if you want to but that isn't usually how I relate to clients."

"You don't usually relate to clients by getting a list of their preferences or you don't usually relate to your clients by having their minds read against their will?"

"- both."

"...Okay."

"I can probably find a language class for you that starts from presumed zero fluency in any starting language. The most commonly spoken languages in the connected multiverse are English, Sindarin, and Orcish."

"I speak English already. I think. I don't think I speak any of the others."

"Okay, so not English. I can try to find you a class in one of the others. They will probably involve meeting the other people in the class and spending hours at a stretch learning vocabulary by having objects pointed out and actions demonstrated. Is that going to be okay?"

He sobs just once. "I've made it through a lot of languages already and I can do one more."

"If you will spend a lot of the class in distress, I don't recommend starting it right away."

"...Oh. Do you not want me to be in distress or do you not want me to be in distress in public?"

"I don't want you to be in distress, the teachers and other students at such classes probably also don't want that, I don't think you will learn as well in distress, there are probably priorities other than learning Sindarin if you're very easily perturbed since you can hold an English conversation all right."

Can he, though.

"Okay. Whatever you want."

"Well, right now I don't know whether you think you'd be in distress during a class if you started one today."

"I think I’ll be in distress constantly until I can go home and then I’ll be in distress most of the time."

"That makes sense. So, in light of that, my plan is to arrange to be notified at once if they find a way to your world, get you couriered home right away, and then let you cope with everything at your own pace while your world has a more normal first contact experience."

"...Really? They’re not going to complain about me not acting decent and going where I’m not wanted?"

"Who?"

Shrug. "I thought the person I talked to earlier who seemed to be worried about how I'm not obedient enough thought it was bad for me to live where I used to live because I didn’t ask permission."

"I don't know who you were talking before or how the conversation got to that point. You were - squatting? Homeless?"