Maybe. On the other hand, if she spends one month being gang-raped every waking moment and then several months having lots of time to herself, that's not so bad.

Meanwhile have some more rape.

Mmm, rape.

Meanwhile Khythen has work to do.

Leaving the hell-pocket by himself is a little risky, but he's careful to avoid humans. The gate point back to the demon dimension is several hours' flight away, but it's pleasant to stretch his wings.

He makes the transition to his home plane with a minute sigh of relief. It's good to be home, even for a brief visit.

It's a few more hours before he makes it to the dwelling in question. He knocks on the door.

And one of the residents opens it. "Khythen! Hi! Haven't seen you in a while."

"Hi! I've been. Busy. Can I talk to Talyr?"

"Sure, c'mon in, I'll get him."

"Thanks," he says. He comes in.

They've rearranged the furniture again since his last visit; now the centerpiece of the main room is a painted wooden sculpture of a jaguar standing on her hind legs and stretching up toward the ceiling. There are different paintings hanging on the walls, and they've dug out an extra few feet of cliffside to expand the room and carved a new window in the northeast corner.

Izaneth disappears off down the hall to fetch Talyr.

He hadn't strongly expected it to be the same. He looks around admiringly.

And after a minute, Talyr emerges from the back of the house, smiling warmly with a touch of concern. "I didn't expect to see you back so soon."

He nods.

"You were right."

"...Really." Concern turns to consideration. "What happened?"

"...One of the captives...reacted...unusually. She liked it. Which. Resulted in enough coherency for conversation.

She's a calligrapher too."

"Ah," he says sympathetically. "Yeah."

Pause.

"So. What are you going to do now?"

Wryly: "Try to come up with a better plan than 'mercy-kill all the ones that aren't her'."

"Do you want my help?"

"Please."

"Of course. What can you tell me about the situation? You have better access to the details than I do."

"Yeah, 'course. There's fourteen captives total, all women, and forty-three of us. Each captive has--if I say 'their own room' that'll make it sound better than it is, they're bare stone chambers with bare stone slabs for sleeping and--other things."

"Hmm. Organizational structure? Who if anyone is in charge?"

"Jiorthkir's the closest thing to in charge but mostly we just do what we want, with enough prosocialness in what people have happened to decide to do so far that that hasn't blown up in our faces."

"Hm," he says thoughtfully.

"...About half the captives are pregnant, so far."

"I think the question is... do you want to save these particular captives, or try to make a bigger difference than that? Because from your description, I'm pretty sure I could walk into that pocket and walk out again a few months later with every single captive alive and free, but I don't think I could come home afterward. And if everyone who notices that humans are people does something like that, it's hard to see how we'll ever get anywhere on convincing everyone else."