The Valar announce that they've done as much as they can in Singularity (they can't bring back peoples' babies in that critical period either, but they can get them earlier versions) and are setting up portals between there and Sanity as soon as they are confident they've cleaned up the plague. A bunch of Elf architects have this wild idea for a fivedimensional city where alternating intersections are interdimensional portals between various Valinors and they get eagerly to setting it up.
They don't seem to have a stepping close to him protocol going on here.
After this cultist has been meditating at him for an hour she leaves and is not replaced. It's dark outside.
He could make light but he doesn't bother. He practices until he can reliably hop across the circle and then he starts mentally picking apart the language they were chanting in.
A loud noise is apparently sufficient to get a cultist out of bed to flamethrower him some more.
They look really tired by morning. When the sun rises there is more chanting.
One of them chants wrong and gets five seconds of garden hose to the face. It looks unpleasant.
Yes, he follows their philosophy of deterrance. His philosophy of deterrance is to be really impossible to deter from things.
Continuous hopping. If he were human he'd be exhausted and leaving chunks of himself behind.
They have to replace the fuel in the flamethrower.
The wielder of the hose murmurs very softly to some cultists in what is probably English.
It takes him two hours to get a sound-amplifying spell working nonverbally. Might've been faster if he had stopped hopping but he does not intend to do that.
There's a flame-freezing charm. He waits until they're not looking, casts it, provokes more flamethrowing.
It's good motivation to get better at nonverbal spellwork, at least. He practices the ones he'll need if they do.
Petrificus Totalus, Minor thinks but doesn't say, and moves his wand very precisely, his Defense professor'll be so impressed when he's back in school -
He pulls the cultist's upper body into the decoy circle.
He shuffles through his damaged flash cards for 'I am being held here against my will and have not been offered a task.'
He sits and waits.