"Who's this?" asks a voice.

"A fine question. Looks too disoriented to be a teleporter. Portalsnake?"

"We aren't adjacent to Dreamward."

"There could be another Dreamward."

"Don't they check for that?"

"Mysterious visitor, what brings you here?"

He would curl up tighter but he's already doing that as much as he can. He doesn’t even try to answer the obvious demons people in a situation where he strongly expects demons.

"...well, if someone could tote him to the infirmary so he isn't taking up conference room space..."

"My host doesn't want to touch noncommunicative portalsnake visitors, worried they'll have something weird going on."

"If it's a weird airborne thing we're already hosed."

"If it's a weird airborne thing we're in a precognition."

"I'll carry them." Yves is scooped.

He doesn’t follow all of that but he follows it enough to worry about the demons seeing the future.

He’s so easy to scoop. Not only is he remarkably light, he reflexively cooperates with attempts to manhandle him. It doesn’t make him more relaxed or responsive to external reality or agentic - if anything it does the opposite - but it looks a little like that since he unfreezes. Once he uncurls a bit it's just possible to notice the hole at the base of his neck that's the result of him having figured out how to suppress his regeneration before cutting his own throat. Pity it didn't kill him but it does keep him from speaking; he's sure these people can change that but at least it'll be one extra thing in their way before they can get much use out of him.

"Oh he's injured."

"It's not like the infirmary is out of your way on the way to the infirmary."

"Not wrong."

Carry carry.

His breathing evens out a little along the way. He's never seen an infernal infirmary before and these people don't talk like demons and that's probably a trick but it might be a trick that involves not hurting him for a while.

He is plopped onto a bed.

"We think he got portalsnook. - snaked? Snuck?"

"You think a portalsnake ate him."

"Or the equivalent, yeah."

"Missut, over here."

Someone comes over and causes his neck to glow green and heal over.

He makes a startled noise but doesn't say anything. He sits up and tries to affect an imperious and disdainful air, an effect pretty badly spoiled by everything else about him.

"Hi there!" says the green-glowy-person, a man in a nice sherwani and turban which matches the green glow with gold accessories. "Was that the only place you were hurt?"

...That’s not how demons dress, either. Not that that means much.

He smiles slightly. He’s a big fan of how this completely predictable violation didn’t involve any pain and the probably-a-demon responsible is pleasant to look at and that's clearly a deliberate strategy to get him to cooperate and he's inclined to be at least as cooperative as he would be if they were hurting him. Which is not very but he'd probably end up opening his mouth at some point if he were being tortured so he does that. His tongue has also been cut out.

"Sir? Anything else you need me to take a look at?"

Well, if that doesn't make it clear, then that's fine. They can just be baffled as to why nothing they try can get him to talk. He shrugs.

"- Missut I think he doesn't have a tongue."

"Cripes, how did I miss that, I was looking for dental problems - was this guy in Angband?" Glow goes on the tongue.

He makes a face and tries not to gag. His breathing is a little too even.

That was really very predictable but he thought it would buy him hours and instead they just did some kind of magic and undid all his hard work instantly and it's terribly unfair. The strategy where they act nice might last him hours anyway, though, or at least he tells himself that to try to tamp down on all the panic. It doesn't help much. He stares at the glowing person's outfit because that way whatever happens next at least he'll have gotten to see something that looked nice for a moment.

"Sir?" says the glowy person, Missut.

He shouldn’t say anything because he hasn’t thought through the precognition thing - only he only knows about it because they said -

- no, he’s being an idiot, words aren’t evidence of anything. Which doesn’t actually mean he should say anything, but. Maybe one thing.

"You’ve been very nice and you’re obviously trying not to act like demons so I’ll humor you long enough to let you know it’s not personal that I’m not going to say anything else. Except that it is. It’s not personal to the people you’re pretending to be."

"Oh for fucksake, he was in an Angband."

"Angbands don't have demons."

"They might if our Allspeak was glitching -"

"No, they don't, it comes through as 'orcs' and 'Maiar' and 'Balrogs' and stuff, not 'demons', I know everything is demons but those specifically are not, just like you and me."

"We got translated as demons in one language one time."

"Okay, fine, but they do check for Ardas, it's probably something else they don't check for."

"Which is just like Angband! Halle-fucking-lujah! I always wanted one right next door, I was feeling deprived -"

"Make yourself useful and go tell Sovereign Ristrell."

He will not be baited into making it clear whether he’s heard of any of those things before.

That seems to be more or less what they expect. One of the people who's hanging around puts on some nice music and leaves a cup of apple juice near the bed where he's sitting and then they leave him alone.

He lies down and appreciates being on a soft surface and tries to think of things that make more sense in hindsight if demons can see the future but there aren’t many. He decides that once he destroys Hell he’ll never tell anyone how or ideally even that it was him, but that’s... not really a near-term consideration.

He waits.

Eventually a couple of the voices he heard before is back. "We could possibly just send him to an appropriate Valinor." A tall dark man in a suit.

"Only after somebody's been by to chase him back to wherever he came from and deal with it, if they've got a portalsnake they may figure out adjacency and such any moment now. Oh, good, someone put music on, are there any other recommendations -" A remarkably average-looking woman with an incongruously severe expression.

"Just to be boring. Possibly you shouldn't actually take this meeting here?"

"Possibly, but give me five." She pulls up a chair beside the bed. "Hello. I'm Sovereign Ristrell. Our supracivilization's previous familiarity with people who've been tortured until they reach a state similar to yours is of fortresses called Utumno or Angband, controlled by the Vala Melkor also known as Morgoth, assisted by various Maiar such as Sauron or Thauron also known as Gorthaur, Thuringwethil, and various balrogs. If this describes the place you came from, it is within our collective power to annihilate Melkor and Sauron and free all of the prisoners, and it would in no way shape or form be surprising to Melkor if you announced that you would prefer this, nor would it make for a particularly dramatic moment to end a simulation. Does that description match?"

...That was obviously crafted to get a response. If they have the ability to do that - which they did not, actually, say that they do, just that they do if that vaguely reminiscent description is an exact match, which it isn’t, which doesn’t matter because words mean nothing.

He will not get suckered into working for the next deceitful nest of sin that pretends to be the good guys. Not even if they really aren’t his demons.

And they didn’t, actually, see the state Hell left him in. (Unless they did. Who knows how long they’ve been spying.)

"When I left they didn’t know me to have heard any of those names. And they didn’t know me to know what drama would have to do with anything. But I wouldn’t dream of trying to talk you out of killing them."

"Thank you. I am planning to keep you here until an appropriate specialist can come and derive information about the world you came from by examining you. They will be aware that they cannot expect to have your cooperation to work with beyond lying there. The standard of care for persons rescued from Angband, which I am going to borrow in this instance, is to have them under supervision in case they commit violence, supply background music to stave off the crushing boredom of refusing to take actions or have interesting trains of thought, allow visitors only on a case by case basis depending on what reaction they elicit, offer optional unconsciousness or death or psychological care, and supply an uncomplicated vegetarian diet. I intend to order this procedure followed with you, filling in details like whether your supervision should be sapient or not with whatever happens to be convenient for us, until we can hand you off to an appropriate expert in another world with ordinary Angband victims, unless you state that you would prefer otherwise."

"...I don't need food. At all. I, uh... I think the abilities you're acting as though you have might not be good enough? If you were expecting I was mortal?"

"Melkors can sustain people in conditions that would normally kill them but this effect doesn't operate outside their domains, so some rescuees from Angband, which I understand you did not personally come from but which I am using as a template, will die without food and water and air. If you don't need food at all then you can ignore the food that will regardless be brought to you per protocol, we aren't about to run out. If you want to elaborate on what abilities you will expect to be necessary I am listening."

"...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.

They actually only have elevators but he can take them down!

The curtains in the infirmary were all closed, but out in the hall he can see that the view is of more buildings and the Moon.

...Where the fuck is that.

Fine. Upstairs. Upelevator. To the teleport office.

Room 117 contains a man typing something intently who looks up when he hears footsteps. "Hullo there - oh, are you the portalsnack?"

"I got teleported here against my will. Are you the person to talk to about going home?"

"My notification says we were going to drop you off in a Valinor but if you don't want to go to a Valinor where do you wanna go, where's home?"

Shrug. "Didn’t you just hire someone to find that out?"

"Maybe so but not so's they'd tell me. You can have a sit and wait to hear back if you want."

He just wants to do whatever will make them quit pretending to be nice.

He sits. He hums The Song That Gets On Everybody's Nerves. His voice is awful.

"Coughdrop?"

Is he supposed to know that word. Wow, this place is full of alien things. Shrug.

The guy picks up a little wrapped candy out of his desk drawer and holds it out.

He takes the mysterious object and sticks it in his backpack.

"The last time I was definitely talking to demons I don't think they thought I knew what a Valinor is so I'm either curious or pretending to be curious."

"Oh, Valinors are this continent on Ardas, which are a kind of world. People who went through Angband collect there because it's convenient and pretty and full of very patient and helpful Elves who take care of them while they refuse to do things."

"That's very thoughtful of you but I literally have no needs."

"Sounds fake but okay."

He shrugs. "I don't pester you to prove your magic and you could do that without - man, I don't know, what would even prove to you that I don't have needs?"

"I dunno, it'd help if you were more specific? Don't need to eat, sure, lots of those, don't need to breathe, sure just like the folks next door - wouldn't benefit from a nice Elf singing you a song after you did a stint in a torture fortress, pull the other one."

He did really like the music. While he was hiding on Earth he had a lot of experiences that beat lying very still on flat stone by himself, so he's familiar with the existence of the category, but that music beat it by a surprisingly generous margin.

He shrugs. "I don’t think the demons thought I had any nice elves singing to me for centuries but I suppose I could be wrong."

"- I don't think I'm going to be able to follow this conversation if you keep talking like that."

Talking is also not a need. He sits in absolute silence with his eyes closed.

The guy will ignore him, then, and he can eavesdrop on people asking to be taken hither or thither.

Ugh. He contemplates math and resents the existence of language and waits for someone to let the teleporter know how to take him home.

Eventually the guy at the desk says, "They're having some trouble triangulating because it looks like you came through a world that bounces people in it an extra step."

He sighs. That's such an obvious excuse to keep him prisoner but it's nice that they're still making up excuses instead of just chaining him up. He does not comment on either of these things.

"So just to be clear, you’re not even ostensibly doing anything about Hell and ostensibly I can’t affect whatever you’re up to regardless of whether the contents of my mind are a trap?"

"...uh, right, though they're like, still trying, it's just taking a while."

"Ah, so it could theoretically in the future matter, and you can’t just ask the future what to do?"

"Do you really want me to try to explain precognition mechanics to you, because I'd just be reading from Wikipedia."

"Not really. I was just wondering if it could possibly matter to anything important if I somehow turned out to have been designed to ruin everyone I talk to, let alone everyone who reads my mind, and it sounds like it could matter."

"Uh, that does sound like it could matter. I'm not reading your mind, I can't do that from over here, and hopefully nobody will try, but if you shouldn't talk to people you should probably still go to Valinor and get sung to."

He shrugs unhappily.

"Do you wanna go there now or just... sit in this waiting room."

He would rather stay in the waiting room than go to Valinor but there’s nothing about this choice that’s important enough to try very hard to get it right and anyway talking about preferences is not a good way to get what he wants. He shrugs.

"Right, so, I'm gonna go with the original plan and drop you off in Valinor. Four hops. I assume you don't have, like, other stuff than what you've got on you?"

"Why would I tell you that?"

"Yeah, I dunno why I even asked. I assume the Elves are used to people like you."

Pop pop pop pop.

It's a stunningly gorgeous forest, with towering redwoods shading the mossy ground and picturesque shrubbery muffling the sound of the babbling brook over there and bunnies grazing in a clearing.

"Just a sec," says the teleporter. He steps past a tree, calling, "Hey, who do I talk to about dropping off somebody who might as well be an Angband victim?"

"Over here! Hello!" replies another voice, belonging to a tall pretty pointy-eared fellow in gorgeous robes. "Thank you very much. Is this him?"

"Yeah. We don't have like, a name, or anything, so if you need to find records he's down as 'portalsnack 54'."

"Understood. I appreciate your bringing him to a safe place."

"It sounded kind of like he'd already escaped and wanted to go back but they're having technical difficulties." Shrug. "Probably somebody'll come looking if they figure it out. All set to take it from here?"

"Yes, I believe so."

Teleporter leaves. The Elf smiles at the new person and starts picking leaves and berries off apparently random plants.

He hates this Elf. He loves this forest which was probably designed to make him love it for nefarious purposes. Or maybe he’s underestimating the awesomeness of natural forests. He shuts his eyes and covers his ears and sits right where he happens to be and resents Valinor.

The next time he opens his eyes the Elf is gone. He is alone in the beautiful forest.

Like he’s going to open his eyes. Then he might see the forest.

At home in the land of the free, he interrupts his busy schedule of silent contemplation with occasional panhandling, hanging out standing guard over a sleeping friend, and buying coffee. He has nothing to do here except sit very still forever, briefly doing math and then being too tired to ever think clearly about anything again for all eternity.

...Or meander in the direction of that hot spring he can hear in the distance, he might be able to sleep there eventually. But - if they realize there are still ever times when he can sleep, they might fix that. So he doesn't. And he gets tired, and starts drifting off enough to start listing to one side, and panics and jerks hard enough to end up rolling down a soft slope right toward it.

That's such a suspicious thing to happen and he's very suspicious of it. He does not get into the hot spring. He does drop a hand in to feel the warmth.

There's a naked Elf in the hot spring. They've got their chin propped on their arms on the edge of the pool so it's hard to tell what sex of Elf. They look at him and blink once and then close their eyes.

That seems pretty valid of them. This Elf is the least objectionable person he's encountered since being kidnapped. He takes his shoes off and sits with his feet in the water, and eventually decides to lie down (still with his feet in the water).

There are occasionally munching sounds as the Elf picks clover and eats it. The hot spring burbles. Birds chirp.

It's so nice. It's even nicer than his park. It's so...

...one very brief power nap later he's regretting all his life choices, even more worn out than before, and very much not enjoying the forest.

Would he like the forest to be some other way? It's very accommodating. (The Elf is still in the hot spring and picking apart bits of grass from the shore to arrange in decorative patterns.)

He looks at the decorative patterns for a bit. Probably the forest will not be restraining and torturing him in exactly the way that is simultaneously not too bad to sleep through some of the time and boring enough for the demons that they never pay enough attention to notice him doing that, because this is a forest and not a torture chamber and he doesn't even particularly want it to be a torture chamber. Probably it will also not contain a coffee shop for the same reason. Though who knows, really, it's - it's obviously either reading his mind or paying attention to his reactions and telling the future - no, that's not obvious, it could also have researched his history in exhaustive detail and be guessing wildly -

- its behavior is really suspicious, though. He's so suspicious of its suspicious behavior. Okay. Quick test. He would like to see seven birds. He would like them to be blue or green or brown, he can't remember what the normal bird colors even are, whichever of those is a real thing. He will react visibly if instead they are red or orange or white, but he is politely silently asking the forest for green or blue or brown. This is so out of nowhere he's not sure how he'd come up with it by watching himself from the outside.

Seven quail trot across the background. They're brown.

The most important thing is to not react differently than he would if there were no quail. He keeps looking in their general direction for a while making steadily more impatient faces before sighing and shutting his eyes in his best facsimile of vague annoyance about the forest's refusal to provide him with evidence. He doesn’t feel like he exists. His hands and lips are tingling. He promises himself he will never ever mention this to anyone.

And now he knows. And now what would he want to do if he didn’t? Would he call their bluff? It’s essential that he keep acting like he can possibly ever achieve anything, like he isn’t totally fucked. He would not start crying. He would not give up. He isn’t sure what he would do. He hopes his guess is right.

He gets up. He walks in a random direction as straight as he can, hoping to find something other than the creepy mindreading forest eventually.

(Thank you for your honesty, he tells the forest.)

The creepy mindreading forest yields in a startlingly short period of time to not-forest. There's an Elf there, who smiles at him.

Smiling people. Why. "I have something to say to the person I spoke to before."

"I can try to help you with that, whom did you speak to?"

"...I think she claimed to be Sovereign Ristrell?"

"Would you like to dictate a message to send to her for me?"

He raises an eyebrow. "No one has even tried to present me with a case that you people don't constitute multiple interest groups who don't all fully trust each other." (Wow, he feels so stupid pretending secrets are a thing he can have.)

"...okay, I can just let her office know that you'd like to speak to her, then."

"Thank you."

They do something with a device, then look up from it and smile again.

The smiling is really obnoxious. He smiles back. It's kind of obviously forced.

"She'll be able to find you in the Lórien if you wait there."

"The what?"

"The forest."

"Thanks." Back to the creepy mindreading forest. At least the creepy mindreading forest has literally never done anything objectionable.

It continues in this unobjectionable vein. What kind of forest would he like to walk into?

He isn't really consciously thinking about that but a canyon full of fascinating rock formations and odd little trees growing in strange places would be nice, especially if it also had a few flowers and a bright blue sky.

Oh look, right over there. Bonsai harvester's dream.

He sits and stares at a strange tree, scowling.

It rustles gently in a light breeze of the precisely correct temperature.

Scooooowwwwwl. He tries not to let it be apparent that this is a vaguely fond sort of scowl because he's pretty sure he'd be unalloyedly annoyed if he hadn't noticed that the forest was a sweet honest secret mindreader. "Hate this stupid forest," he mutters. Please don't feel bad, he thinks.

The forest gives no indication of feeling bad. A hawk circles overhead. A little lizard clings to the canyon wall.

Probably she won't show up. Oh, well. It doesn't really matter. He would probably be pretty close to lying down and giving up forever at this point even if he thought the forest could neither read minds nor see the future.

There's a nice spot to lie down over there, if he wants.

Somebody comes trotting up behind him. It's the teleporter guy. "Sovereign Ristrell said you maybe wanted to come back?"

"I had something to say to her if she wants to hear it."

"- I don't think she's going to come here in person, but I can take you back to Tide to see her if you want."

"Sure." Does she hate being mindread by the creepy forest? He doesn't ask.

Pop pop pop pop.

"Her office is on the eighth floor, room 2."

"...Thanks." He can try to find it. Maybe he'll even succeed. Probably to absolutely no benefit, but.

Room 2 has the door propped open. Ristrell is doing something on a device, with many screens. She raises an eyebrow as he enters. "Welcome back."

"Hey. I was trying to say something earlier and I'm not sure I said it well, should I try again?"

"Go right ahead."

"I don't know if I know anything useful to you. And I don't know if instead maybe I've been lied to - I mean - I'm very sure I've been lied to. I don't know if I've been lied to in a way that was meant as a trap for someone else, like giving me inaccurate information about the demons' weaknesses or something. I don't know if it'd be a waste of your time to sort that out. But if you're worried about powerful people getting mad at you, I don't think I'd tell them, and if you're trying to care about me and what I want for some reason, I don't feel especially happy about the idea of you taking how I feel about it into account because how I feel might have been - engineered - and even if not, I don't think it matters much, next to all of Hell."

"I don't follow what you mean about powerful people getting mad at me. Mad at me for what?"

"You're the one who said your mindreading policy was related to a... specific stripe of politically and magically powerful individuals? Is that how you put it?"

"- yes. They don't need to be reported to, to find out, necessarily. I don't formally belong to their organization but broadly agree that consensual mindreading is superior to coercive."

Shrug. "Seems like a nice policy if Hell isn't involved."

"The comparison facility, Angband, features quite a lot of mind control."

"...That's fucked, man."

"So I am led to understand."

"Why are we talking about them?"

"About Angbands? I can understand why a Hell that didn't involve it would leave you fairly inured to mindreading et cetera, but it is not itself a necessarily nontortuous activity if deployed against the unwilling."

"It kind of sounds like it'd suck. That's not - if you could materially affect your chances of ending Hell by, uh, waterboarding me, I wouldn't be mad at you unless you'd run into a million people you mistakenly thought you could end Hell by waterboarding." What even is waterboarding, he picked this example for being something they talk about in America and has no idea whether the name refers to something he's experienced. Which really makes the conversation easier.

"Your after-the-fact emotional disposition is not actually what this principle tracks," she says, though she's looking more steadily at him and away from her screens now. "It's whether, in advance, given the expectations you and not I have, you'd want to be mindread, if for example that's a capability your tormentors did not evince."

"...I would really strongly prefer that that capability not exist, and that implies not wanting it to happen to me? - I don't know who runs Angband, if it's even a thing you didn't just make up to fuck with me, but I wouldn't be more surprised by demons being able to use permission, that's what all the fairy tales say they do when they visit Earth and I don't know if any fairy tales are trustworthy sources on anything either but the thing where you seem like you're trying to get me to say something really specific is not making that seem less likely. And it seems - stupid for you to base your decisions on my expectations, addressing the person you're presenting yourself as, because the version that's actually a demon isn't going to do that so you'd only even consider it in cases where my expectations are completely out of step with reality - never mind, what I mean is I don't really get your decisionmaking process and I'm probably too stupid to get it. I don't know enough to have a preference."

"The mindreading ability that I and mine in particular have, as opposed to some other people you could have gone to, is that my species are parasitic invertebrates that can enter and operate hosts with comprehensive knowledge of the still-conscious host's history and dispositions. It is surprisingly easy to find hosts who are interested in this arrangement," she gestures at herself, or, uh, her host's self, "but it is not something that I can within my charter and international obligations impose on someone. I am not a fairytale creature trying to get exact words, I am noting that you said things like 'that implies not wanting it to happen to me' and concluding that probably, like most people, you don't want it to happen to you."

He takes a moment to try to breathe evenly. He opens his mouth to say something and then concludes it's actually time for more breathing, and then manages to answer.

"...I don't think it's worse for it to be a thing that happens to me than for it to be a thing that only happens to other people if it's - if you - never mind, I was going to say 'if you're really the sort of people who have rules about it for other people's sake' but I think that also doesn't actually... matter... if it would at all affect the likelihood that you would end Hell. But if you insist on hearing about my feelings, if you can do that I - think probably knowing for sure would - have some upside."

"If you go on in approximately that vein for a bit longer I will at some point call it good but I would really like an airtight case to present at my next meeting with the Imperatrix should it come up."

"I would probably hand you a vacuum jar if I had one," he deadpans.

"Do you have any comments on the question of whether it should be me or some other Yeerk?"

"I don't - I'm really not qualified to figure out what would be the best way to end Hell and - " and if he didn't deserve Hell he would end it there because the fewer words he says the faster things change " - that's really the only important consideration but I've done horrible things and it wouldn't really matter if whoever it was were - never mind. You're the second least obnoxious person I've met since being kidnapped today."

"I don't actually think this process will meaningfully accelerate the handling of Hell. They haven't found it yet and would be turning your information into a plan of action only with more corroborating sources."

"Why did you string me along, you asshole."

"You're difficult to understand when you're being obfuscatory, and sometimes Angband victims want similar interventions by way of proof that they are no longer there, even if this won't help destroy their Angband at all."

"I’m not saying I wouldn’t be happy about that but - the inside of my head isn’t something I'd really expect anyone to like getting to see and I sure wouldn’t want to end up delaying you for it. And I don’t know if how I feel was deliberately arranged somehow to cause problems for other people so I’m really not happy about anyone taking it into account but I guess that could apply just as well to taking it into account that I feel that way about it."

"I don't think you need to be worried about the welfare of Yeerks who go into your head if any do so."

Shrug. "I think I've told you literally every consideration I can think of and how I feel about them. I'm not very likely to be mad about it, whatever you do."

She sighs. "If you will stand just there and not move, I will go and have a look and then come right back out into Josefa again. I will go ear-to-ear to minimize uncomfortable handling procedure." She gets up from her desk.

Does freezing in terror count? Because that's what he's doing.

Yup. That counts.

She plants her ear on his and extends into his brain.

He is really very miserable about this, but then, he's really very miserable about almost everything. He's terrified of it happening at all, and disappointed because he caught the implication that they can also control bodies and wanted to test that, that part would be new and easier to verify and have a lot of implications. But he genuinely doesn't think his preferences should get any weight at all so he's not really considering asking her to do more than take a look and leave.

He does have a detailed mental map of Hell, one that might even be useful if they couldn't just conjure it all anyway.

It wasn't much like Angband. It wasn't as bad, and the lies weren't as competent. The place was presented to him as Purgatory, the torment as purifying and exalting. It should have been easy to suspect something, if he'd been thinking straight, but he never really got that chance. There was literally never a moment when he was neither in pain nor at work; they trained him out of even wanting to eat, and tried to do the same with sleep; they kept him desperately lonely and interacted with him mostly to ask things of him. And the things they asked weren't usually horrible - copy books, construct a printing press, scrub the floor, learn new languages - but sometimes they were. Sometimes he was asked to be the one to wield the knife. Sometimes he was asked to take responsibility for the minute details of when and how. He was asked to help teach.

When he got away he cut his tongue out because it was their tool and it didn't even work the first time. He put his eyes out because he couldn't trust them, because he wanted to stop being tempted to believe anything he saw, because gaslighting per se never happened to him other than through sight or hearing (and he thought for a long time about whether he would rather be deaf). He didn't want them back; he didn't parse himself as having a choice; the sense of ownership of his body he was starting to build back shattered when Missut healed him and he doesn't endorse even suggesting that anyone change their behavior in any way over his stupid preferences that were obviously installed by demons on purpose to cause problems, but it feels just a bit silly to be so precious about something he obviously wants and asked for and to just decide to reshape his body on a fucking whim. He thinks it might have taken days to get it all set up stably so he wouldn't just heal. It might be faster now. It wouldn't be nearly as fast as what Missut did, though.

He's exhausted - he still doesn't eat and sleeps even less now, though now he has enough to drink and regular social contact - and he wants so desperately to stop. If ceasing to exist were an option, it'd be a very attractive one. He'd take laying down somewhere comfortable and never moving again, if it seemed like there wasn't anything useful for him to do. He'd take being a yeerk host, probably, if it didn't involve being used for anything he wouldn't endorse and he got along at all with the yeerk. He misses sleep; he has a tendency to have some unholy bastard child of flashbacks and hypnic jerks whenever he tries, and if he waits enough of them out to actually fall asleep he has a tendency to proceed to immediately have horrible nightmares. And then wake up almost immediately. And then have flashbacks about it. He'd take being tortured if it'd convince his stupid half-asleep hindbrain that no one was coming after him.

That's - really most of it, though. Just sheer exhaustion and a little gaslighting that probably did involve illusions but not immersive ones. He was pretty confident about living on Earth right up until he got teleported, a thing demons and no one else he knows of can do and which he was concerned about demons doing to him if they ever found him. He's got a friend and a hobby and a favorite coffee shop.

He's got a lot of languages, so hey, that's something. He'd forget them all in a heartbeat on the principle that things he was taught by demons are probably a negative amount of useful to know, if he could, but he can't.

He thinks it's pathetic to hope for but he's trying and failing not to wonder if Ristrell can tell him that actually it's obvious where all the landmines are and it's fine for him to talk to people and fine for him to take his own preferences into account.

She rearranges his position slightly to get his ear above Josefa's. (He can probably hear that Josefa is breathing kind of oddly now but is waiting to accept her Yeerk again.) She goes out.

She straightens up and goes to transcribe the map of Hell. "You aren't a memetic hazard. You can go straight back to the Lórien and lie there indefinitely and I will send you a messenger when they've figured out how to go to your Earth. It is possible you can be annihilated but it would be something of a research project since your sort of immortality is new so you would probably be advised by relevant researchers to try at least one of those things first."

"...Thank you."

He doesn't have any better ideas than taking her advice and he does already know where to go to get teleported so he'll just go do that.

The teleporter is up for popping him right back to Lórien.

These people are so invested in him being in the creepy mindreading forest. Whatever. Hey, creepy forest, can he have a really hard surface to repeatedly bang his head against in an attempt to knock himself out?

No. He can have soporific-smelling flowers?

Stupid horrible creepy forest! He’s tempted to rip the flowers up but what if that hurts the forest? ...What if it hurts the forest when he stands on it?

Whatever. The yeerks have better ways of making him hurt people than sending him to the forest in a bad mood. And the horrible forest is allowed to drug him if it likes the idea of getting to watch his nightmares. He lies down and grouchily smells the flowers.

They send him aromatically drifting off to a dreamless sleep.

He would find a way to complain about that were he but conscious.

The flowers back off at the precise right time, of course, leaving him to awaken pleasantly in the exact best sort of sleeping spot.

He doesn't get up right away. He just lies there and thinks for a while.

If the yeerks were actually evil he'd have some huge problems but they wouldn't have much reason to lie to him, right? They can do whatever they want. If what they want involves not enslaving everyone they meet, that's nice, but there isn't actually anything he could hold back from them and so it'd be stupid to try. There is really nothing he wants them to only have if they're evil, after all.

Ristrell and also the creepy forest presumably already know that's how he feels about it and probably no one actually has any use for him, or at least no use worth putting up with his horrible memories for. And if they're going to destroy Hell, that's... well, that's great, that's the only thing he's really sure he cares about. And with that done or at least out of his hands he really doesn't have anything else to do. And it's not even exactly that he wants to do things, really. There is definitely some part of him that's glad that, since he's completely useless and cannot affect anything that actually matters, he can stop. There's just - nothing else. The forest can be interesting if it wants, or it can be obnoxiously paternalistic, or whatever it happens to feel like, and it doesn't matter. Lórien just... inherently lacks most of the good things about nature. Because it isn't. Because there isn't a story in the shape of every tree. Because it isn't real, it's just a work of art that seems superficially like a forest if you don't think too hard about it. And boy does he ever hate that there's anything with the ability to read minds and construct unreal space-warping scenarios optimized to provoke specific responses, though given that anything like that exists he's not going to complain about the specifics of its behavior. It could do so much worse than being extremely open about what it is and optimizing for comfort.

It's just that it's a suffocating cocoon of false beauty that can't quite actually hide the gaping pointlessness of his existence. But this is where everyone has seemed to think he should be and it's not like he has any reason to prefer anywhere else.

Hey, Lórien, got any brilliant ideas for how to fix that by cleverly arranging trees?

A spruce rustles sadly. It does not solve his problem.

I'm sorry your problems are fundamental to the way you are. They seem worse than mine, if you were looking to wallow.

The forest has no obvious reply to this.

He'll just stay here until someone wants something from him. He's not sure if he wants them to or not. On the one hand, if they did, he'd have things to do. On the other hand, if they did, he'd have things to do.

He goes unbothered except by the forest trying as hard as possible to be relaxing and lovely.

He discovers within himself a preference other than to end Hell, and it is to not be in this forest. The people who have so insistently tried to get him to experience the forest can either live with that or possess him and make him go back. Goodbye, horrible forest.

The same Elf is waiting on his way out. "Hello. Where to?"

He blinks confusedly and shrugs.

"Humans aren't actually welcome in most parts of Valinor," says the Elf apologetically.

The fact that everyone trying to get him to go to Valinor was making stupid decisions does not cause him to know any local place names besides Angband and he doesn’t want to go there. He just sighs and sits down and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

"You can spend as long in Lórien as you need or want, though."

Sigh. "I already haven't, thanks. Look, you're the fucking gate guard who knows where they'll have problems with me, I just got kidnapped to this plane of existence today."

"Oh, you can go most places - do you want me to pull up a map, or a list sorted by something?"

"...Sure."

That's not a very helpful reply but the Elf will guess and pull up a map of the multiverse. "I don't know if you have Allspeak yet but I can read it to you if you don't."

"I don’t know what that - hang on. Did I skip a standard introduction because I showed up visibly maimed and everyone decided to act like I came from Angband?"

"- I suppose so, usually if you'd been contacted purposefully your whole culture would be getting introduced to multiversal opportunities together."

"If there’s a place I can go for that it’s probably a better idea than the world’s worst forest."

"There's the integration office in Edda?"

"That might be good. I’m sorry I snapped at you, I guess if I had come straight here from Hell I would really have appreciated how you and everyone else have been acting."

"It's okay, I'm not upset about it. I can't teleport but I can ask for someone who does to come get you and bring you there."

"Thanks."

"Are you okay to wait twenty minutes for them to finish what they're doing?"

"Fine."

Twenty minutes later another Elf appears on the scene. "Integration office in Edda?"

Shrug. "Apparently."

The Elf takes a moment to decide if that counts, exchanges looks with the forest-guard Elf, and then pops over one hop to drop off the passenger at an Integration Office.

Okay. He'll go say hello to whoever is on duty there.

That's this horse-looking person! "Good day! What are your most urgent needs?"

He contemplates this for a moment. "I don't have any needs, literally, at all, although someone I previously spoke to wanted to argue that it counts as a need if you enjoy music and I sometimes enjoy music. Anyway, I got kidnapped here by accident and apparently they say they can't figure out how to get me back to the place I live."

"Gosh. Well, what are your most urgent wants?"

"Uh, hm. A place where I won't be pestered by people who think I should really be somewhere else and the geography is consistent from moment to moment? Some kind of... explanation of where I am and what's going on?"

"I can get you an apartment and answer most standard questions, but not knowing where you come from my explanation won't be tailored to your context, do you just want the most generic possible one?"

"I suppose saying I’m from Earth won’t help?"

"Oh, that helps a lot, actually, can you also tell me what year it is?"

"Uhhh... I’m not totally sure if it’s changed since the last time I saw a calendar? I don’t think it’s 2020 yet?"

"Okay! So, you're in Vanda Nossëo. It's a big, interdimensional federation, with member states in lots and lots of different worlds, and a lot of those worlds have more than one inhabited planet, too. This world is called Edda, and this planet is called Kallee, and this city is called Skoq. I work for Vanda Nossëo on the federal level. Vanda Nossëo was founded by powerful altruists of several species and worlds, who wanted to explore, learn more about magic and technology, and have everyone working together to make the best possible use of it to bring about universal sapient flourishing. There are some mysteries we still don't understand, like why Earths are common or how humans pop up in worlds that aren't even Earths, for example, and there are some problems we don't know how to solve yet, but there are trillions of people in Vanda Nossëo all working in their own ways toward making the civilization as strong as it can be so we can one day tackle those too."

"...Uh-huh. How do I... interact with that."

"Do you want to be a citizen of Vanda Nossëo, or just relax while they work on getting you home?"

Shrug. "Does being a citizen involve any responsibilities?"

"Not breaking the law? But the exact nature of the law will depend on where you live."

"...What exactly are 'laws'?"

"A law is a rule that is enforced by a government, so, for example, everywhere in Vanda Nossëo, it is illegal to murder people."

"What does it mean that it’s enforced by a government?"

"People who commit murders are arrested and usually spend some time in prison. Vanda Nossëo prisons are much nicer than any pre-contact Earth prison though."

"...I don’t know what that means. Maybe I want the version where you explain more."

"Okay, let's imagine a simpler crime, like stealing something from another person. If you reached over and took my ring off my hand and then I said, 'hey, give that back,' and then you decided not to give it back, and instead ran away with it, then if it were just a rule of my workplace that you can't steal, my boss might help me get it back, but since here it's a law not to steal, then if my boss wasn't able to get it back, they could get help from government workers whose job it is specifically to catch thieves and take back what they stole. A law is a rule that is important and common enough that you can get government help if someone breaks it and this causes you a problem."

"...What?"

"...on your Earth, what would happen if you stole something?"

He frowns in intense concentration. "...I haven't tried it but I can... speculate...? I think the person I stole from might beat me up? After I got stolen from my friend helped me keep it from happening again? I don't - I don't know but I don't think Congress keeps really careful track of things like that but I guess it does give people food stamps and maybe that's because of theft? I don't know anything about food stamps because I don't eat. I think it was different when I was in France, I think the government would - do different things than you're thinking of. Uh, and I'm not totally confident that I actually know which things actually get people sent there, but Hell exists and I think people at least think you go there for sins like theft and in Hell you might get bathed in acid or thrown into lava or disassembled."

"...okay, so, it sounds like you have some atypical-for-most-Earths life experience." says the horse person. "Do you know what a rule is? A law is a kind of rule, and it's a little different from other kinds, but unless following the rules which are also laws sounds like it will be hard for you, I'm not sure the difference is important to understand today."

"...Maybe? Probably? I don't think I get what following rules has to do with the government helping people."

"The government has rules for itself, and one of them is that it will help people who were hurt by anyone breaking one of the rules."

He makes a succession of different baffled faces. "...Okay, so, you’re saying it’s okay to hurt people as long as I do it by breaking the rules?"

"- no... can you tell me what steps you took to get to that idea?"

"...Because if the government will fix it then they’ll be fine? I guess that doesn’t mean I would be fine when the government was done with me."

"Most people do not prefer to be in trouble with the government, and most people also don't like having crimes done to them, even if they get help afterwards."

Shrug. "So if I broke a law, how would I notice?"

"Well, you should probably have at least the gist of the laws of anywhere you want to be explained to you. If you break a law someone will probably tell you about it. An innocent mistake won't tend to get you in much trouble, if you were trying to cooperate with the rules around you."

"...If the government stopped enforcing laws tomorrow and forgot to warn people, and you broke a law, would you probably be able to figure out that they'd stopped enforcing them?"

"It would... probably depend on what law."

"Okay. I think I would like to know what the laws where you would probably notice are and how you would notice."

"It would also depend on how I broke it, actually. Because part of enforcement is making sure to find out without waiting to get a report. If I found somebody nobody was expecting home for ages and murdered them, then a government enforcing the law would find out about this, even if nobody saw me. A government that did not enforce the law might not notice. But if I parked my scooter on the front steps of the capital building and the government was not enforcing the law I might not notice the difference between that and the parking robot not having come by yet."

"...Can I maybe... describe some things I have experience with, in case that helps you figure out what I'm asking?"

"Sure, go right ahead."

"Okay, so, as an oversimplified model, if you're in Hell, there are things that make the demons angry. If you make the demons angry, they'll probably drag you away from what you were doing and boil you, or if they're not very angry they might just hit you. If you try to fight them when they do those things, they'll do the same things plus some more things. Usually you would learn what makes them angry by doing things and discovering that they're angry. If they're not watching, they'll look in at random times. On the other hand, also as an oversimplified model, in America, there are cops. They come cause problems but I think they're kind of random about it? So if someone is causing a bunch of problems, more problems than having cops around, you could call them, but they might shoot you instead of the person you were hoping they'd deal with. I can't vouch for the accuracy of that part, I never met the cops. What I can vouch for is that Congress doesn't do very much? Like, the whole time I've lived in America, Congress has never come to drag me away to be boiled, and I'm not sure if there even are things they'd care about or if they're just not actually watching. They didn't do it when I got beaten up, they didn't do it to this guy who I kind of suspect was committing lustful sins by himself, and they didn't do it for theft. Apparently what the laws are was so unclear that there were people arguing about it? Like, some people were arguing about whether some human beings are illegal. I think. But people said that America had laws and I'm not sure if they were lying or if they meant something by that. And now you're saying laws are about helping people who got hurt? Or that the government can have to follow them? I don't think I really get what kind of thing you're talking about, I'm not getting - if I do something, then what's the percent chance the government will come hurt me and how will they do that?"

"How long have you lived in your early-2000s America?"

Shrug. "I dunno, it depends on how you count and I also lost track of time. I don't think it's been more than a few years or less than a month."

"Okay... I'm not from an Earth, but I think Americas are usually more functional than that. I wanna refer you to someone from an Earth who'll be more able to tell if your Earth is weird or if your lens on it is weird. Okay?"

"...Fine? Sure."

The horse person swaps out for a human guy. "Hey. She was summarizing so I don't know if I have all the details but 'no human being is illegal' is a political slogan about people entering the country without government permission and being called 'illegal immigrants'."

"Well, I didn’t think anyone asked permission for me to be there and Congress still didn’t come drag me away to be tortured."

"Congress doesn't directly do any legwork. They argue about what the laws should be and if enough of them agree then the thing they agree on is officially the law, but it's other people's job to see it actually put into practice, and a lot of those people, and a lot of Congresspeople too, are really really bad at their jobs. One way they're bad at their jobs is they guess based on visible ethnicity if somebody's likely to be an illegal immigrant and you look white."

Shrug. "Okay."

"In Vanda Nossëo, people with important jobs are almost all very good at them. This means that while officially laws in early 2000s America aren't that different, they wind up being implemented and talked about really differently."

"...Okay. So you’re saying it’s more like Hell?"

"...there's no torture, Vanda Nossëo doesn't do that literally at all."

"...So then when things are illegal, does that mean that anything happens to you if you do them or not?"

"Yes. Just, the thing is never torture. Sometimes you have to pay money. Sometimes you just get a warning. Sometimes you get put in jail. Sometimes you get banned from being in whatever place you broke the law in, or near the person you broke the law, uh, at."

"And if you decide you don't want to be in jail or you do want to be in whatever place - I guess you just can't decide that because - huh. No, I guess the people who don't like alcohol would be mad at you if you hired the yeerks to keep people in jail. Right?"

"The... people who don't like alcohol... yeah, no, we don't use Yeerks for that. Just like, doors, and force fields, and magic."

"Oh. And if you hurt someone the government will try to fix it?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. I don't think I care about your laws. No offense."

"You only care about laws if they're enforced with torture?"

"Pretty much? If you were torturing people that would suck and I'd try to figure out if I had some kind of angle on getting you to stop."

"We're... not torturing people. I think if you don't like torture you should probably help make not-torture work okay for getting people to be decent to each other."

"...What does people being decent to each other have to do with laws?"

"That's what laws are... for... like not killing people? She said she mentioned the not killing people one?"

"...I thought laws were about things like... theft, murder, adultery, lust, entering America without permission, existing while black, resisting arrest, drugs, mispronouncing things...?"

"Vanda Nossëo doesn't have laws against existing while black - that's also a police not being good at their jobs thing - or about mispronouncing things, which I think you must have misinterpreted somehow, or lust or adultery, which early 2000s America doesn't have laws about on any Earths I knew about this morning... most parts of Vanda Nossëo have laws against theft, some parts limit who can go into them, all of them forbid murder."

Shrug. "I didn't spend that long in America, I know what's allowed in Hell a lot better. But I also don't see how it's not being decent to people for me to go home and live in the park with my friend instead of being trapped in a horrible warped forest. Maybe it is somehow but you know what, I don't see how and I've decided to make a habit of not believing other people about right and wrong."

"If that were illegal in some part of Vanda Nossëo, which your Earth isn't since it's newly discovered by us, then it'd be because people wanted the park to not have anybody living in it. I mean, if they didn't let anyone live there. If they just didn't let you there it'd probably be because you weren't allowed in their place in general."

"It's possible I don't know what the word 'decent' means but I - " He shakes his head. "I don't know, what does it mean to be decent to people?"

"Well, uh, I usually start with not murdering or torturing them, and then follow up with letting them have their stuff and decide what to do with it themselves, even if there's a bunch of them and the stuff is a park."

"No, I mean English isn't my first language and I was taught it by demons who might have taught it to me wrong on purpose to fuck with me, and the thing you're saying doesn't make sense."

"- I have no way to tell what language you're hearing when I talk, because of how the translation magic on me works. Do you want to... look up 'decent' in a dictionary or something?"

"...Sure. Fine."

He looks it up. "Conforming with generally accepted standards of respectable or moral behavior," he reads.

"...Oh. Fuck. Thank you. Anyway, I don’t think I care about that if there’s no torture involved and I don’t know what this was supposed to be leading up to."

"I don't really have a way to make you care about it but if you break laws you will get in non-torture trouble and this will limit your freedom of movement and resources."

"I already have no resources and I'm only here in the first place because I am looking for a place I am allowed to sit that won't get me pestered about how I should be in the horrible forest instead and that also isn't the horrible forest, has a consistent enough geography that it would be even slightly sane to draw a map of it, and doesn't have any torture. I do not care if that involves being chained to a wall. I wouldn't care if you gave me to the yeerks. You can't threaten me with anything you're willing to do."

"...okay. I'm going to get you an apartment. You can sit in it." He does some device things and gives him a key card. "Take that moving sidewalk to the green offramp and then elevator up to the seventeenth floor, your room is the Pelican Room, got a picture of a pelican on it."

"Thank you." He takes the key card and takes that moving sidewalk and so on to the Pelican Room.

The key card, waved in the vicinity of the pelican-adorned door, lets him into a nice little apartment with loosely pelican themed decor, like someone didn't want all the rooms to be the same and started picking random birds after a while.

The important thing is that it doesn't belong to anyone who can reasonably pester him to go to Lórien instead. He gets onto the nearest soft surface without even pausing to shut the door or take off his shoes.

The hinge is attached to a spring apparatus that makes it close by itself. The room has no comment on his shoes.

Meanwhile (a word which here means "not happening at all") in a precognition, Vanda Nossëo's explorers find Hell. It doesn't even slightly resemble any secondhand memories Ristrell picked up, except in that it's also located in a vast cave system. There's a vast tall sprawling city of stone and bone housing a decadent royal court that routinely hosts cannibal feasts (it's... okay? worse than expected? it's something, anyway, because their victims simply cannot die even of being eaten). The city is decorated with sculptures and abstract murals. The murals are painted in human blood. It's not clear that it's ruled by demons; it seems to be an unusually unpleasant human polity.

No, sorry, that's not where they would land. Can't imagine why the last precognition suggested that would happen. When they look into the future again, they see something else.

Vanda Nossëo's explorers find Hell. It doesn't even slightly resemble any secondhand memories Ristrell picked up, except in that it's also located in a vast cave system. There are glowing rocks and strange plants and it is definitely ruled by demons and the only other animals are - well, maybe they were all humans once? Each of them some number of humans? They're warped and terrible and exist only to be injured and broken and remade as a collection of pieces of art catering to some very inhuman sensibility.

No, sorry, that's not where they would land. When they look into the future again, they see something else.

This time, Vanda Nossëo's explorers find Hell. It doesn't even slightly resemble any secondhand memories Ristrell picked up, except in that it's also located in a vast cave system. Instead of sending them on, it traps them. At least some of the people there are lucid enough and friendly enough and educated enough to talk multiverse maps. There are safer places to try to aim for, or so they say, not nearly enough of them but some. There's Earth (not adjacent to Cube) and the Bastion of Peace (not adjacent to Cube, either) and the Dead Republic (likewise) and...

Here's this lovely totalitarian dictatorship on a beautiful desert island archipelago. It's adjacent to Cube and from there they can reach the Dead Republic, which isn't horrible at all, just a whole new world with over ten billion inhabitants for Vanda Nossëo to make contact with, and they know which of the several hells calls itself Purgatory. They have a brief summary of issues escapees tend to have - questions are bad, coming or going; names are fraught at best; they generally won't eat or sleep, sometimes won't drink; they're sometimes genuinely loyal to their demon masters. They think Vanda Nossëo should establish diplomatic relations with New Jerusalem.

New Jerusalem is going to be easy to get along with. It's mostly a vast grassland with a few very big cities. Food is free. Wifi is free. Some limited housing is free. They've dealt with refugees from hells before; they have a residential facility for refugees from the specific one in question. Their major problem is - well, they get all the dead babies. All the dead babies. And on their Earth people have souls from fairly early in pregnancy. But, hey, they've got a bunch of information about all the hells which they're not super interested in declassifying but will admit to having written down.

And incidentally the local magic is great at redirecting incoming teleportation away from private areas, the demons can be destroyed by Disappear magic or temporarily disabled by black holes, and the locals have their own way of going between worlds that seems to mostly or maybe only work in their own neighborhood.

Okay. Is there a safe route to New Jerusalem? What is the adjacency layout of this neighborhood?

The first thing resembling a safe route goes from Cube to the totalitarian archipelago that is merely a human amount of totalitarian and then to the Dead Republic and then Earth and all the afterlives are adjacent to Earth.

Is the archipelago at least in a world with normal enough physics that they can establish a teleport outpost a trillion miles away?

It’s not that big. They might be able to put one underwater? Or check if one of the safer worlds is adjacent to somewhere other than Cube.

Yeah, they will once they have a safe-enough route work on figuring out where else this neighborhood touches theirs. They will also put an underwater dome down.

And back to the here and now.

There is someone miserable in an apartment. He lies still for hours, and when he gets tired enough that it gets hard to think about math he thinks about coffee instead. He has no idea where they sell it. He has no idea if it’s safe to panhandle here but he’s leaning no, and he has no local money, though maybe they’ll take dollars. Apparently those things were just not as high a priority as telling him he should obey if he wants to be a good person. And also if he doesn’t. Where has he heard that before. (To be fair to the whole idea, his extremely vague recollection is that France might also have been like that and wasn’t awful.)

So, no coffee. And this is the only place he’s sure he can be. And there’s nothing anyone will ever really need from him.

He shaves when he itches too much to keep putting it off (with shaky hands and a naked razor blade but who really cares, right?) and then goes and sits on the balcony in the hope that it will be more bearable than being inside the apartment.

There's a lady on the next balcony over. Smoking a cigarette. She raises her eyebrows at him. "You're new."

He looks at her. He shrugs.

"Lady who had that place before you was standoffish too."

He used to have a convenient response to people who got annoyed at him for not talking to them and now he doesn't. Thanks, Missut.

"I've taken a vow of silence," he says, drawing his knees up to his chest. It was supposed to come out very deadpan but he's having a little trouble keeping his voice steady at the moment.

"Wow, okay, have fun with that." She takes a drag.

He looks at her again and sighs. But he’s not scowling and doesn’t even look very dead inside now.

"I didn't take a vow of silence though," she says after a moment. "Hello, my name is Arlene and my daughter resurrected me last week but I don't know why she bothered if she was going to be so inhospitable, all, 'smoking is banned here Mama' and 'you should get your own place Mama' and 'you've missed a lot Mama' and 'Johnny doesn't want to see you Mama'. What gets into a girl that she brings her mama back to send her to live somewhere all by herself without even a cig?"

....Shrug??? He looks kind of bewildered about all this. "Did she get you out of Hell or do you not have that here."

"Nah, if I got out of Hell I'd be a demon and it'd be a summoning not a resurrection."

"...I'm so sorry," he says gently.

"Being dead's not like anything for normal people." Puff.

"I hope that's true and you're not just a copy of someone else who's suffering somewhere."

"Wow, do you moonlight teaching people how to give folks nightmares? What a thing to say!"

He flinches convulsively and after a moment of horrified staring he curls up very tightly.

"Jeepers," she adds after a thoughtful plume of smoke.

Ristrell didn't think - Ristrell claimed - he understood Ristrell as claiming - 

- he thought he remembered understanding Ristrell as claiming -

- but here he is, horrible to listen to. He's just going to bluescreen about that for a minute.

"Are you having a seizure over there? I used to have a dog that had seizures. That's another thing that I don't like about all this," ash-tap, "modernity. They won't let you get your pets back, just people. Or you can do it but you have to go to someplace five times as expensive for some reason. It's not like it'd be any harder to bring back a dog than a person."

Fuck fuck fuck he’s going through caffeine withdrawal and he usually drinks so much coffee that he literally can’t fall asleep even after multiple days spent awake. His hands aren’t steady enough, and he’s not awake enough, to fix what Missut did.

He isn’t actually sure what "having a seizure" means so at least he’s not tempted to answer. He is kind of tempted to ask what the fuck she’s talking about but he doesn’t.

"I’m sorry," he says, even though probably he shouldn’t say anything.

"Have I gotta call the ambulance on you?"

"...I don’t have an opinion. I’m so sorry and if there’s some way I can make it up to you I’ll try."

"...you sound like you maybe need an ambulance. I hear they're not even expensive nowadays." She fiddles with a device.

"If you want me to go away you can just say so."

"You got an ears problem too?"

Nothing about this conversation makes any sense. Maybe he missed some subtext. He'll just go back inside on the theory that that way he's unlikely to keep bothering her.

There is an urgent knock on his door.

Fine. Whatever. He opens it, looking extremely done.

"Hi!" says a ginger with too many teeth. "We got a call from your neighbor that someone here was possibly having a seizure or a panic attack."

He just kind of looks at them blankly because even if he wanted to be helpful that's not a question or a request and he doesn't know what a seizure is and barely has the faintest clue what a panic attack is.

"Is there anyone sharing this apartment with you?"

He gets out of the way of the door in case they feel really invested in learning the answer to this question.

...okay, he will go search the apartment. "Sir, do you think I might have been called for you?" he asks when he discovers the place empty.

Shrug. "Sounds plausible."

"...would you like me to heal you or should I mark down that it was a false alarm?"

"I don't have an opinion. If you wanted to be very nice to me for some reason you could tell me what 'seizure' and 'panic attack' mean."

"A seizure is when electrical connections in the brain are disrupted - it can cause strange movements or lapses of consciousness. A panic attack is when an anxiety reaction like shortness of breath spirals out of control and makes people feel like they might be dying."

"If I ever think I'm dying I won't react by grimly having no opinion about it. Are you totally sure brains are supposed to have electrical connections in the first place."

"...yes, they are, for most people."

"Okay. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Can I get your thumbprint here affirming that you don't need healing?" He proffers a device.

"Huh?"

"- would you push the pad of your thumb on here, to say that it's okay that I am not healing you, so I can show my boss?"

"...If you want but why couldn’t you just grab my thumb and put it there if you found me passed out from ODing on heroin?"

"Because that would be fucked up? This is just to make sure you understand and are making an intentional choice."

"I don’t understand anything and am just doing what I’m told."

"Okay, I can explain then. Your neighbor called me because they thought you might need healing. Does that part make sense?"

"No."

"Oh boy. Uh. I am an emergency response healer. My job is to show up when someone might be having a medical problem, and help them with it, or take them to a hospital if I can't help. Ordinary people like your neighbor help out people like me with doing our jobs, by letting us know when to show up. Does that make sense."

"I understood all of those words, probably, unless I was taught incorrect meanings for them or otherwise ended up wrong about understanding."

"And I showed up here today, to help you, but you don't need me. Right?"

"I also understood all of those words."

"And part of how my organization makes sure that people like me are doing our jobs is, when someone turns out not to need or not to want healing, we ask for their thumbprint. - you don't have to give me your thumbprint or else be healed, to be clear, that's not a requirement, but, that's why I'm asking, I get more questions if I can't get the print."

"You can have it, I just still have no idea why anyone would claim to think I needed healing in the first place or why you decided I didn’t."

"I don't know your neighbor but most people don't want those around them to go without medical attention they need. You don't seem to be having any medical problems or to want help with any I can't see but I can heal you if you want."

"...Are you sure my neighbor didn't summon you here because I hurt her and she wants someone to deal with me."

"If she was trying to do that she did a very bad job of explaining it but I can knock on her door too if you're worried about her."

"I don't have an opinion about whether you should do that."

"...okay."

Anyway. Thumbprint. Since that is the thing this person wants.

"Thanks. Do you... need... anything?"

"As far as I know I'm incapable of ceasing to exist so not really but there's no reason I would ever need my judgment intact again so now seems like an okay time to make questionable choices about drugs?"

"I don't have any drugs but you should get a tripsitter if you want to start experimenting with them."

"I don't know how to do that."

"Usually you'd ask a friend."

"I don't have any friends here."

"That sounds like a problem and I don't know how you should solve it."

He laughs bitterly. "Yep."

"I could get you a social worker?"

"I have no opinion about whether you should do that."

"I'm gonna get you a social worker. One should be by in the next half an hour or so."

"...Okay."

In half an hour or so he'll be lying miserably in bed nursing two different simultaneous headaches.

Knock knock.

He opens the door.

Lanky dark lady with beads in her hair. "Hello. My name is Nocawe. Emergency services told my department there'd been a false alarm here but that they suspected you'd benefit from being connected to services of some kind; that's my job."

"Okay." He does really look like he'd benefit from services of some kind.

"May I have your permission to access records about you in applicable Vanda Nossëo systems?"

"...Okay."

She does device things. She says, "There's no name in the system. Do you have a name you want to use?"

Wince. "No."

"Okay. You're my thirty-third client so I might refer to you as 33 if that won't bother you."

That gets a tiny, startled smile. "I don’t have an opinion about what you call me."

"The records I've pulled up say that you appeared via uncontrolled teleportation, consistent with a portalsnake, in the Yeerk polity of Tide in Cube, which called in a specialist for finding a route to your previous universe and remanded you to a Lórien principally dedicated to Melkor victims in Elentári, being as you seemed to have a substantially similar history, having been in 'Hell'?"

Shrug.

"Does that sound like what you remember?"

"I don’t remember if anyone mentioned 'Tide' or 'Elentári'."

"Gotcha. Tide is the one run by Sovereign Ristrell."

"I might have met her, if I didn’t just imagine that."

"The records say you did, at least. Do you often have experiences that turn out not to have happened in reality if you try to corroborate them, or are you just concerned about it anyway?"

"Well, you know, maybe I just imagined having those experiences," he says wryly. He wanders back over to the bed and flops onto it.

"Do you sometimes attempt to corroborate an experience and discover evidence that contradicts your memory?" she tries.

"That’s what I remember!" he says brightly.

"Ah-huh. Okay. And you're - not quite indestructible but divorced from human physical needs?"

"I seem to eventually heal from everything I don't go out of my way to avoid healing from."

"Does this leave you still experiencing any discomfort when deprived of air, water, food...?"

Wow, rude. But Ristrell already knows everything anyway. "Yes."

"I can set you up with a service that will deliver meals here to you at regular times; would that work for you?"

"...I don't eat, thank you. And I would rather have coffee anyway."

"May I ask why you don't eat if it's uncomfortable not to?"

"...I don't think you want to know and I don't think I want to tell you."

"Okay. Do you want help with getting or making coffee?"

"I don’t think I have any local money unless you take dollars."

"If you become a citizen of Vanda Nossëo, you can get paid money every couple of weeks just for existing, and if you don't want to be a citizen, you're still eligible for charity."

He tenses up. "...I think maybe I’m not obedient enough for that."

"...can you elaborate on that?"

Shrug. "I think someone said something about being a citizen but I had a question and then they had a bunch of questions for me instead and then they lectured me about how it’s right to obey the rightful authorities and also they’ll try to hurt me if I don’t but supposedly they don’t have the stomach to do more than restrain me and I... don’t really understand anything anyone said but maybe it bothered them that I didn’t pretend to care? And they didn’t say anything else about being a citizen or answer the questions I went to them with in the first place. I’m not sorry and I won’t obey anyone ever again even if that means I’m not allowed to know what Allspeak is or have any money."

"It sounds like whatever conversations you've had about that haven't been very successful at communicating with you."

Shrug. "It wouldn’t surprise me if I just don’t understand anything. I’m already pretty sure I was taught most of the languages I speak intentionally badly by demons."

"Wow. Uh, is there a language you're pretty sure you've got learned correctly?"

He thinks about it and tries to call to mind the first language he ever learned, one he hasn’t spoken in lifetimes. With effort he drags enough words to answer from the depths of his memory.

"A long time ago, but not anymore."

"Do you think you'd benefit from a language class that would aim to get you conversant in one of the most popular Vanda Nossëo languages, maybe one you haven't studied before to get a fresh start?"

He flinches. "...Probably. Maybe if it doesn’t involve learning definitions in words in something I already know. I would have thought Ristrell would have caught anything really glaring but she also didn’t think I would hurt people just by talking to them."

"Do... you think you will hurt people just by talking to them? Why?"

"It sounded like I gave my neighbor nightmares," he says in a hollow voice as though this is among the most shameful things he can imagine.

"That may have been hyperbole..."

"...Oh."

"Even if it wasn't, I'm not sure this level of guilt about it is - adaptive, for you."

"Huh?"

"I don't think it helps you, or your neighbor, or future people you might meet, for you to react this way to the idea of having introduced someone to an idea that they then had nightmares about."