"Would you have been safe if we had never -"

"How would that have helped? I mean, I guess it could have had some ripple effect and I might have been standing somewhere else, but I think I was plenty appealing enough from a strategic perspective."

"And conveniently there are detailed books downstairs about how it goes if you don't land on us." Sigh. 

"Yeah."

"Has to be kind of flattering how much Bells do for Ardas."

"Taken at face value, absolutely. I mean, I'm a little braced for the part where orcs giggle about how arrogant I am that I thought that made any sense, but that wouldn't be an unusually bad instance of the thing, even, I am at peace with my arrogance."

"None of the paths I go down are at all flattering."

"Well, we sort of knew that to begin with."

"Yeah. Must have been challenging coming up with a narrative that strung all the prophecy fragments together, unless he just knew all the details to start with..."

"Lack of creativity does not feature in this one."

"And not even towards anything. It's very disconcerting."

"Maybe I'm so boring when I don't think that I'm getting cozy downtime in which I'm encouraged to think so I'll be more responsive in the future."

"Would that even be necessary to get you to be responsive - if they had Aydanci -"

"If I wasn't thinking I couldn't evaluate his likelihood of being himself in the first place and now I've gone and done that. This didn't instantly lead to catastrophe though." He checks his time-syncing thing.

Squeeze. Sigh. 

Snuggle. "They've tried that a few times, but not with Aydanci because they can't fake him, they say they've got you or Findekáno, but when I'm shut down I'm really shut down."

"The shutting down is honestly brilliant."

"Thanks. I'm not positive it wouldn't've happened even if I hadn't been trying though - it's sort of a - I just attach a flinch reaction to everything I think until I stop, I don't think I could do it if I didn't think I was being mindread and I'm not sure I could have not done it given that I did, although I definitely sped it up."

"But you still think you're being mindread, right -"

"Well, yes, but now I've actually tried the thing and in this environment it conclusively does not help and fuck is it ever boring."

"And Aydanci missed you for such a long time anyway."

"Yeah." Check. "I'll go back to it when it starts hurting again. Almost did when I hit my elbow on a doorframe, he panicked."

...he nods.

"There was this one not-particularly-intended-to-convince-me hallucination where I woke up extra clumsy one day and just kept accumulating injuries till it bled into one of the torture ones, it was hilarious."

"He liked setups where I chose it for some reason. I was a very idealistic young idiot, before, wasn't hard to come up with them..."