<Yeah, probably he's not too fragile for it at all. It was a long time ago that Ithil had an Utumno, thousands of years.>

Thousands of years is older than him, if he’s at all correct about his age. He'll see this guy.

The guy is to be found on Ithil's Tol Eressëa. He doesn't have an office and is to be found sitting on a specific rock.

Ooh, a rock! What kind of rock is it?

It's carved into a chair, but subtly, so you could imagine it came that way naturally or was worn into it by people sitting in it for thousands of years - maybe the latter is actually true. It's basalt.

Hello, says the Elf. I'm Colindo.

Ooh, basalt. He likes basalt. It’s nice and familiar. He waves and smiles at Colindo, who clearly has good taste in rocks. Are there perhaps other conveniently chairlike rocks nearby?

Hi. I got tired of having my name taken away over and over so I refuse to pick a new one and if that’s upsetting then you probably want to stop talking to me now because it gets a lot worse than that.

There are a few chair rocks nearby!

I'm fine, but thank you for being concerned for me. It's good to have held on to that through everything, being concerned for people around you.

I’ve tortured people. You’re not literally wrong that I’ve kept being concerned for people but I have tortured people.

It would be easier to just send memories but that seems really rude.

Do you want to tell me more about that? asks Colindo, unruffled.

Shrug. I don’t really know if it’d be useful to. I don’t really know... how to decide?

He sits on another rock and runs his hands over it and shuts his eyes.

Colindo is both of a) an Elf and b) of the "sit there and allow awkward silence to prompt conversation" school of thought. He waits.

Some of the things on the internet about therapy said it involves talking about things like that and some of them said other things. I didn’t come here with a plan. I don’t know what would be a good idea. I’m not sure what will achieve my goals because I don’t have goals that I know how to make progress on. I don’t know if it matters what I’ve done. I don’t know if I can say anything trustworthy about it given that they were doing what they could to wreck my memory and confuse me.

I wish I could talk about the people I knew but I don’t remember some of them and I don’t know how accurate anything I thought I knew about them really is. And I think - I don’t feel like I’m supposed to? I feel like people here want me to... be done with that? Like - people are so solicitous about nightmares and not very concerned that I panic when I wake up if there’s nothing literally stopping me no matter what I dream of. It seems like they’d be happy if I just forgot everything about it. And maybe I should. Maybe I should just focus on the future. It’s not like Hereafter Reunions would help if I asked them to track down someone I hurt once.

No?

Do they? Seems like the kind of thing where they’d expect it not to help anything.

I've never looked into it. Did you?

He makes a face. Can he get online here?

No reception.

You don't have to. I only wondered if you'd done it, and whether you wanted to.

I don’t even know if I want to. I don’t know if it’d end well. I really just... keep losing things, and those things suck and I don’t want them back but - anyway. I'd say this can’t possibly be on topic but I don’t think I know what the topic was.

The topic is you, and how you're feeling, and what you need and what you want.

That feels kind of uncomfortable.

I don’t think I know about half the things I’d want if I knew about them. I want to be able to eat and I want more friends and I want people to stop thinking they can just pretend I’m an Angband survivor and I want to know... how exactly I’m supposed to do the thing other people do where they look at how miserable I am and see problems they could solve and then solve them. And I want -

This part is hard to put into words. Here, have some feelings and concepts. He has vague problems he can’t articulate and even when he does articulate them he doesn’t have much of a toolkit for dealing with them. He’s improved a lot, which means he can now carry on a conversation and reliably articulate at least one relevant consideration when Nocawe is trying to figure out how to solve his problems instead of shrugging at everything and bursting into tears. His best strategy when he notices that he has a problem is to hope Ashkon can solve it. Which works, but he'd like to outsource a little less of the work.

And meanwhile, he has a lot of skills and knowledge. It’s just that it’s not very trustworthy or useful. So he just... ignores it, and feels sort of shrunken, as though all the parts of him that were for doing things have withered away. It’s not like he can... okay, he hasn’t checked if he could somehow solve his problems by enduring pain, panhandling, recognizing rocks by feel, doing surgery on dead people who heal in exactly the way he does, hurting people, or constructing a printing press. It just doesn’t seem very likely, and he doesn’t know how to check. And not knowing how to check seems emblematic of a bigger problem with decisionmaking that he'd like to solve but doesn’t know how.

If you imagine someone who didn't have those problems, can you guess what they'd do?

Well. Yeah. They'd study composition at the University of Brithombar and learn to sing and play the hammered dulcimer and bathe in weird sludge instead of eating. He can model someone without his problems very well. That doesn’t seem useful since he doesn’t want to be Ashkon 1159. He thinks maybe he misunderstood the question somehow.

Mm, someone more like you, except for not having the problems.

If he were fine... he pictures that in his private thoughts. He'd wake up and not be terrified. He'd... go to work? Doing pentesting? Somehow? He can’t picture that. And then he would... have lunch, maybe, since it’s useful, and he would just be able to do that. He...

Yeah, the thing is, he can’t picture that. He publicizes the fact that he can’t get a clear picture of what he’d be doing. If he just had an easy time coming up with things to try... he can’t really figure out how he'd do that either. He keeps thinking publicly.

Almost everything feels pointless, anyway. He likes it when Ashkon does fun things but the idea of going swimming or something alone feels much less appealing. He misses feeling like he was good at things and doing things that mattered, but it wasn’t true when he felt that way so he’s probably not getting it back without changing a lot as a person. So he doesn’t see how he could have a good life and he doesn’t entirely see why he should bother.

Honestly he misses Purgatory, which is a horrible thought but he’s not fast enough to hide it.

You knew what to expect there.