His host dislikes tea but in a guilty way where liking it feels almost like a real possibility and that's not quite as comfortable as uncomplicatedly hating it. Maybe the exact right tea wouldn't suck very much if it had milk in it. It might suck for it not to suck, though.

<Do you like drinking anything because that kind of seems like it might be easier than finding things I like.> And if it's worth trying then it might be easier to bring himself around on something he knows makes someone else happy.

<Well, I don't know, I haven't tried anything with anybody else's mouth, but I like this tea. I might want to go smell all their other tea to guess if there's one that might be tastier.>

<You can drink whichever of the teas you want.>

When he says things like this it's usually, at least a little, at least in the background, a statement of fact about the abilities of a well-organized polity with the ability to read all his thoughts and control all his actions, or a refusal to do anything so vulnerable as preferring one thing to another, or both. But this time it's just permission.

The underling, whose name is Shadow, arrives and glances at their bracelet. "Hi, are you Ashkon 1159 and Arguably Cody?"

"Yes, that's us. Can I get you a tea?" Ashkon asks.

"I actually hate tea and I was planning to see if they have anything icy and obnoxiously sweet later but that’s really less the kind of thing you politely sip at a meeting. Anyway, I’m good for now, thanks. So, hi, nice to meet you. Congratulations on not being tortured by demons right now."

"Uh... thanks."

"So it’s actually very hard to get useful victim testimony from the Underworld and almost anything you can tell us might be useful, but I recognize that this isn’t a very useful question. What have you, either of you but mostly Arguably Cody, found the most difficult about adjusting to your new circumstances?"

(He found it hilarious and charming to be called Arguably Cody the first time but being called the same thing twice is more like being named and that itches.)

"Can you stop calling him that? His social worker called him 33, or you could just say 'your host' in this context. He found it pretty hard to get the information he wanted and not information like it must have sounded like he wanted when he asked people for help, is that the kind of thing you mean?"

"Yeah! Can you unpack that more?"

He dislikes both those name options (it's fine if Nocawe specifically calls him 33 but when it escapes its context it feels sort of like a name with a cute history instead of the most transparently halfassed nickname ever; it's really not fine for him to be primarily known as Ashkon's host because he's already deeply ambivalent about the extent to which he's just kind of a thing Ashkon uses and he would like it to feel a little more conspicuous that there's a gap where a name should be instead of feeling sort of like referring to a shirt or something) but he dislikes the idea of there being some connection between his feelings and what he gets called in this conversation even more so whatever.

He suspects that people who have a process more relevant to him than whatever it is they do to people from Angband wouldn't actually make the same mistakes about what he did and didn't already know but he's not confident they wouldn't make any mistakes. He wants to know what Shadow would say to some of the things he thinks he recalls saying to various officials, like asking how to interact with Vanda Nossëo or saying he didn't care about the laws because they didn't involve any torture, before he can venture anything even vaguely resembling criticism that might be relevant to Shadow's organization.

"He doesn't know what your usual procedure is, so he doesn't know what the differences are, but -" To the best of his host's recollection he can reconstruct representative conversations.

"...Yeah, I would definitely think almost any line of questioning about laws was mostly about torture. I don't think I'd say more than, like, 'I see' if someone said they didn't care about laws that aren't backed with torture, I would just guess that was just someone trying to get a rise out of me or see if I went back on the no torture thing. I guess also - so I work for St Edith's, and that's a residential program pretty specifically tailored to people who've escaped from the Underworld, so we can, say, expect that everyone there shares a certain amount of context, and we have things set up so there can be a small enough number of rules that we can just list them really quickly? Which is a thing we can do mostly because we're far from everyone else and there aren't random people who didn't opt in to being there except for, well, the people we serve, and they can leave. If they, you know, can."

"Are... your rules backed with torture?"

"No but try telling that to anyone who graduated Demon U. I have tried that. About the only thing that works is listing the damn rules and watching them break every single one and not breaking out the thumbscrews. There's a lockup but there are rules about leaving anyone in it for more than a few hours even if what they're getting up to is, like, trying to stab you just in case that'll be the thing that finally makes you snap."

"Huh. This one doesn't seem to experience a lot of stabby impulses."

"Not all of them do. It kind of looms disproportionately large for me as someone who likes my blood on the inside."

He feels sort of surprised to be described as not seeming to experience a lot of stabby impulses. He thinks of himself as pretty easily convinced to resort to violence and downright sadistic.

But he did spend the entire time he was free refusing to do violence to anyone for any reason. And maybe Ashkon would know.

<You shut down because someone exaggerated about getting nightmares! I guess in other circumstances you'd act differently but I'm not, like, constantly stopping you from stabbing people.>

"You should maybe hire limboites or fairies or something."

Would this conversation benefit from his memory serving up a highlights reel of his victims begging? Would that help anything? Absolutely not but it's happening anyway.

"That is probably a good idea!"

Ashkon picks up his school satchel and hugs it. "What else do you need to know?"

"If you know anything about the people who haven't previously tended to make it anywhere we can grab them from, that's something we haven't had a great window on, but I'll be a bit surprised if you do."

He has a vague guess that those people would be the ones they can't use, and that since the torture only let up when they were getting what they wanted it might just not. But that's barely anything and he doubts it's news.

He doesn't know where they'd have kept people like that. He doesn't recall meeting any.

"I don't know much about your grabbing apparatus. He speculates they might have been harder to use, for demonic purposes."