The room is -

Sometimes when he was healing from something he'd be left in a tiny room that was meant not to be more than a little injurious, and there's something of that here, a tiny space for stashing a person who isn't being hurt. But not really.

There was a room with a spiked chair and it was dark enough that he didn't see much of it, and he spent the entire time he was in it too restrained to learn about more than the spiked chair, and it was where he was taken when he fought back. And whereas everything else was merely so horrible he would rather never have been born, what happened there was, so far as he can tell, as bad as the demons knew how to make it. They didn't settle for it sucking a lot. It was optimized.

And that's what the dorm reminds him of. They didn't settle, and the thing they optimized so hard for doesn't just happen to be a different thing than misery. It's the exact opposite of misery. And the show of wealth and the obvious careful study of how to precisely influence someone's exact level of misery leaves him unsettled even though he loves and is impressed with the dorm.

<So I don't suppose you can make me stop thinking about the thing I'm thinking about now before I somehow give myself a flashback - hey, is that the right word?>

<I think it's the right word... I can try to distract you.> He speeds up a bit. Asks for directions to the school store. The Elf who gives the directions mentions that they have clothes there with an encouraging smile.

They are going to go look at pretty Elfy clothes! They will pet fabrics and hold up various colors next to their skin!

!! <3! Actually there's nothing wrong with his judgment at all. It brought him here, didn't it?

<3!

Ashkon, being as he is from Tide, isn't a citizen of Vanda Nossëo any more than his host is, but he does have a scholarship, and the Elves seem to have a pretty strong interest in him not going around in a t-shirt and yoga pants anyway, so he walks out of the campus store with a satchel and a notebook full of staff paper and a fountain pen and a little toiletry kit and a headscarf and a potted flowering plant that matches the color scheme of their room and a hammered dulcimer and also two sets of Elf robes. Everybody who talks to them seems to know there are two of them in there.

Well, yeah, they have a bracelet on specifically for that purpose. It's sweet that they remember he exists as a separate person, he can't even manage that himself sometimes. He suggests a color scheme for one of the sets of robes.

<Oh, uh, this kind of Elf can read minds. The bracelet also tells them but if it winds up under our sleeves they'll still know. You can learn to shield your thoughts but it seemed like this would be okay with you if it's okay with them, and it is and they can listen less if it does ever start to bother them.>

Meep. It's mildly uncomfortable to be thinking everything for a large and mostly unknown audience of people - Ashkon is a single specific person he has a relationship with, and Lórien wasn't presenting itself as the kind of thing he needed to interact with like a person - but probably not really worth hedging people out only if they're nice people who would tell him how to shield his thoughts and in alternative possible realities continuing to have his mind read by assholes.

Well, it's probably worth knowing how, anyway.

<You're really sure it's okay with them and they can listen less if they want to?>

<Yeah. The way you shield your thoughts is you think about some of them as being in public or in private, usually with a metaphor like 'indoors' and 'outdoors' or something, but they can listen less.>

He immediately adopts the indoors/outdoors metaphor. Outdoors like the park where he felt safe sitting and thinking and wasn't constantly menaced is for private thoughts; indoors like in the caves where he had to be constantly watching himself is for public thoughts. It belatedly occurs to him that that might not be the usual direction for that metaphor. It'd be easier to practice if he could test it but whatever.

Maybe it's good to be able to hide just how much of a mess he is. So people won't suggest that he should be in Lórien again instead of having fun here, or that Ashkon should be giving up on his dream out of some kind of vague principle. (This line of reasoning is outdoors.)

<Does that work on you or just them?>

<Just them. Not basically any other kind of mindreader. Elf mindreading is particularly polite that way.>

It's kind of nice that it doesn't work on Ashkon and only mostly because it's nice to have an excuse to stop worrying about establishing trust from a baseline of total Cartesian doubt. Also kind of awkward, though. (This, too, is outdoors.)

<Do you shield your thoughts or can they just read me through you?>

<I've been practicing. I slip sometimes, I haven't had a lot of chances to get feedback, but I seem to mostly have it down.>

Vague acknowledgment. It sure would be nice to get feedback.

<...Can I talk to other people the same way I can talk to you?>

<If they're magic Elves you totally can.>

He can talk to so many people.

...Of course, he could do that yesterday and just look what he did to that poor woman. Even if eventually she can maybe supposedly get the nightmares fixed. (This thought is so very outdoors.)

<I don't know much about how humans talk to each other that you don't but Nocawe thought it was hyperbole, remember?>

...He’s unreasonably averse to concluding that actually she was being mean to him. And that’s unreasonable, isn’t it. It’s entirely possible that she was just responding to him upsetting her by trying to upset him, isn’t it. He can talk to so many people, an unknown number of whom might suck even if they are not demons and Tide as a polity is trustworthy. Since they might not enforce laws against sucking, or someone might be doing it for the first time.

<I'm not even sure she was trying to be mean. Maybe it's just an expression where she comes from for some reason.>

That would explain a lot. There are maybe actually zero things that would be weirder if that were true.

<...I’ll have to thank her for getting me help. Like, it was clearly an accident, but it kind of wasn’t, you know?>

<Yeah, she didn't understand what was going on with you but thought you might need somebody and about that part she wasn't wrong.>

Imaginary fervent nodding. Nocawe is so good. Ashkon is also so good.

<3

Ashkon goes back to the dorm room and changes into the Elf clothes and heads out to go for a walk through the pretty, pretty buildings and pretty, pretty grounds.

The place is so good. He doesn’t really know what to do with things being this nice.

At some point in all these walks Ashkon might notice how annoyingly weak and out of shape he is.

That is a little inconvenient. He sits on the ground to rest now and then and keeps going.

The ground is also nice. (Geology is actually a long-running on-again off-again special interest of his, though almost entirely from a stamp-collecting angle and he’s mostly encountered igneous rocks. It hasn’t occurred to him that he could take any actions about this.)