"...I like plain water and black coffee and if you have food to spare and give it to me instead of a starving person I will understand why you would do that as long as you think you can - " and he stops cold because he was about to fill in something made up and random that technically matches the description she gave of getting information without needing him to do anything but now suddenly he realizes his made-up random example is the only thing he can think of that matches her description and it's the only thing he's even mostly confident demons can't actually do.

She waits in case he's going to finish the sentence but doesn't otherwise react to the cutoff. A nurse takes his apple juice and replaces it with an ice water. "We don't have any starving people."

He makes a noncommital sound and ponders what to say for a moment. Okay, so, the most important thing is to figure out whether it gives anything away to comment on the fact that it seems notable that it seems to him like she's acting like she wants him to believe she expects him to expect that mindreading is a thing. That might be what he's supposed to think the person inspecting him can do and it could also be why she said something about not having interesting trains of thought. But the others mentioned precognition earlier and if that's real it could be used to fake mindreading. Okay, how can he get more information about whether she wants him to think that mindreading is a thing without tipping his hand about whether he found it notable that she implied it was?

"Is your appropriate specialist going to be annoyed if I spend the whole time having obscene daydreams?"

"I would be astonished if Vanda Nossëo sent me someone who was going to read your mind, so no, not a bit."

"...Is that not how you were planning to mine me for strategically relevant information?"

"- no. Mindreading is pretty strictly regulated. The relevant information is what world you came from and someone with the right magic can probably figure that out by looking at you and then trying to teleport to 'wherever that person came from'. Probably in a precognition given the givens."

"...I came from a park. On Earth. If you're hoping to go to Hell, I wasn't born there and I didn't come from there."

"Oh, that's good to know, thank you. - though it is also confusing because they also check for Earths."

Shrug. "Well, I have no opinion on whether you should try to get more information than that out of me."

She raises an eyebrow. "If that is true it is a peculiar thing to say."

"It seems like a thing you’d have thought about. I don’t... I don’t have trustworthy judgment about anything, including recursively. So I don’t have an opinion. But it’s..." He shrugs. "It’s interesting that you say you wouldn’t. I don’t know. I’m probably wasting your time saying anything at all."

"I do not allow people to waste my time. I can hand you off to an underling, but my underlings will do a better job at more routine work."

Shrug. "If you want to try in vain to satisfy my idle curiosity about the decisionmaking of your persona's persona, I’m not stopping you."

"You're curious about why it is internationally frowned upon to read people's minds without permission?"

Shrug.

"A specific stripe of particularly magically and politically powerful individuals have a particular distaste for mind-reading and mind-altering effects. I am told they also don't drink alcohol, for example. But it's also an intimate, high-leverage, and usually asymmetrical process, which many sorts of lawmaking apparatus have reason to eventually elect to forbid in the same way that a body of law will tend to condone less and less physical violence over time."

...Asking questions was a big mistake. He runs abruptly out of tolerance for modeling what it means that people present themselves as people who present themselves as people who ad infinitum. He shouldn’t offer because she might be a demon. He has no idea if she as she presents herself would be able to use anything he knows or if the contents of his mind are too pessimized for that to be a good idea. And he can’t figure it out because whatever evidence he decides to wait for, they can tell what it is he’s looking for and show him that.

He curls up again, not quite as tight as before, and starts crying.

That's not really an unexpected thing for an Angband victim to do at pretty much any time and the model does keep working. Ristrell nods politely to the medical staff and departs.

He refuses to have opinions about that either. He doesn’t know if he wishes they’d prove they can read his mind. It’d mean he should give up, but it’d also mean he could give up.

Whatever.

They keep the music playing and periodically resupply him with water and coffee and various food that he can ignore if he prefers.

It's... fine. Temporarily. While he's mulling over things he needs to mull over, anyway.

He hates them. Their personas are lies that are also liars - they're pretending to pretend to have but not use mindreading, he has no idea why - and they're taking forever to pretend to do anything about Hell and they're kidnappers who just... what can you even call it, reverse-maimed him? They made it clear how trivial it is for them to decide exactly what senses he has and exactly what abilities he has and pretended to think they were being nice. They kidnapped him, or maybe that was a complete and total coincidence, maybe he happened at complete random to be transported by magic to people who themselves do magic and had a plan for what to do with him. Who knows, anything's fucking possible. Their coffee is terrible, or maybe all coffee is terrible and he just got used to not having a tongue to notice with; either way, it's their fault. But really most importantly, they're holding him here, and he was getting so fond of not being a prisoner. Not overtly, anyway, and maybe actually not at all.

But their terrible coffee is coffee and he has math to prove.

After a couple of hours somebody in an outfit that is in ridiculous conversation with the ridiculous outfit of the glowy healer shows up and the staff show her to his bed. She looks at him. "Okay," she says after a moment, "do you guys want to teleport him to whichever Valinor yourselves or should I do that?"

"We've got it," says the nearest nurse, "or so I'm told."

"Great. Thanks. Mister, your suffering will not be in vain, we're gonna get the bastards." She smiles and disappears.

He scowls at her smile.

That's his entire ostensible contribution to their supposed future defeat of Hell, if they're telling the truth, and also if they're telling the truth there's not much point in him doing... anything, really.

So if he tries to just walk out, does that make the torture start? Time to find out.

"Teleport office is upstairs in room one seventeen," says a nurse, taking somebody's pulse.

What an obvious way to get him to take the stairs down. Which is what he's going to try first.