And eventually, after what feels like an eternity, she finds stairs leading up. 

Would that be a good idea? Then again, she's completely lost, so it's that or keep roaming around until she finds something less likely to lead directly up into the actual inhabited parts of the lab.

An arrow connects with the back of her shoulder and she curses loudly and decides that she is in fact taking that risk.

The door leading upstairs is locked and solid metal but Lucky does have a bomb and it does the job of opening that door nicely. Also probably attracting the attention of many experiments. 

Once up, it's very clear very quickly that the place has been completely evacuated, with nice offices and cubicles showing signs of barely-not-panicked scrambling to get away asap. Whatever security has been called hasn't arrived yet, though, so she has the run of the place. For now.

Man, what did the people who work here do to deserve the punishment of having offices so close to that chaotic Hel downstairs? 

And oh this is such a golden opportunity, who knows what she could find here? But on the other hand she can hear the commotion downstairs of the experiments trying to find her so rather than try to do anything stupid she will find somewhere to hide long enough for them to forget about her. Then she can find incriminating evidence or explode some stuff or whatever.

Well. There's this little cubicle right here. It's got more stuff in it than most of them, and a (flimsy) door.

Yeah she doesn't need the door to offer protection, just cover. Into it she goes.

It's... cozy. Decorated with very careful attention to detail. On the desk are a potted succulent, and a very nice-looking abacus which might be imported from Amatsu or somewhere, and a framed sketch of a little boy wearing fancy clothes and a slightly uncomfortable smile.

On the wall there's a painting of an ancient-looking castle. The drawing might've been professionally done; the painting isn't. The brushstrokes aren't so much unconfident as they are confidently wrong. Even the frame hangs a bit oddly, not quite flush with the wall, as if there's something behind it. ...that might be less a mark of poor quality and more a sign that it's hiding a wall safe, to be fair.

She will Not Look. She will instead hide under a desk and wait until she can't hear any more noises. 

(A part of her is starting to realise that, just like the experiments had been dormant downstairs, they might go dormant up here too rather than returning, in which case she's hosed. But, well, cross that bridge when she gets to it, any plan that ends with her out of here and not using her suicide contingency begins with the not-ghosts no longer actively looking for her.)

She can hear the commotion of the strange clones running around. She can hear them stay there a while. She can hear an attack—though plausibly it was just a rat that startled one of them. She cannot hear them say anything, because they don't speak, they just move.

And eventually she can't hear anything.

Yeah but that fucking rogue can be really fucking quiet so she'll wait here a bit longer.

So the silence will settle and stretch on.

...probably some form of security will appear soon, right? 

.......are the creatures gone?

She will certainly not be able to determine that from under the desk.

Right. Yes. Of course. 

Well, there's no cost in being invisible and very very quiet, just in case, but she probably should get out.

......okay but she saw a bunch of things that made her really curious and, and it could be useful information and, and, and she realises she's making excuses but the mission's already gone tits up anyway so she might as well indulge.

Now what's hiding behind the painting...?

A safe! It doesn't have a keyhole or tumbler, though, just a little magic-reader that'll respond to a specific keystone.

Ah.

...can she...

.......she absolutely cannot. She shouldn't even try. This is Not In Her Wheelhouse.

Instead she will explore the rest of the cubicle.

The desk is full of ciphered notes, with charts and graphs and tables of data attached.

...one of the drawers doesn't want to pull as far out as its mates; it sticks on something, a few inches before its full extension.

Okay if there's one thing she's good at is mechanical dexterity, surely she can figure out how to open it?

Oh, yes, absolutely. If she lifts a little as she pulls, it slides right out of the desk, and inside the hidden compartment is a twinkling little gemstone.

Twinkle twinkle little gemstone, what does it do, if there is one other thing she is good at after years of messing with magic rocks is being able to tell what a magic rock does.

Mostly. Most of the time. In general terms.

Well, this one poisons her. And paralyzes her hand, so she can't let go of it.

"That's not the key," says a young man a few feet above her. If she cares to look up, he's perched like a gargoyle on one of the dividing panels. If she doesn't, well, who knows.

"It would've been really very stupid to hide the key right there, next to the safe," she agrees. "I didn't think it was. I just really like shiny rocks." Her metaphorical finger is on her suicide trigger but this guy talking to her probably means that she's fine for now? "It's nice to meet you, I'm Lucky."

"No, there is a keystone in here," he insists. "It's just not that one. I was kind of excited to see somebody test the system, actually, nobody's tried. Maybe I overthought it."

He hops down, his shiny black shoes meeting the tile soundlessly. The cubicle isn't quite big enough for the both of them; he puts the succulent on a little shelf and sits atop the desk where it was.

Even though she's currently invisible, he's remarkably respectful of her personal space.

You know what, he's not the only one who's going to be testing new technology, here. She's never had reason to check whether her delivery mechanism for the condensed green potion works, not wanting to poison herself, but it is a mental motion she programmed into her legs, and she can feel the needle go directly into her and start slowly pumping the generic antidote into her bloodstream.

"So, why didn't you evacuate with everyone else?"

"The subjects were confined to the lower levels. And if any did make it up here, I could take care of them."

He frowns at her legs. "That's a bit rude, isn't it?"

(It isn't working, rude or not. Whatever this rock is doing doesn't fit traditional delivery pathways or their inhibitors.)

"Not any ruder than you poisoning me," she points out.

(She should look into muscle relaxants and maybe get Alchemist Olga to look over her work. Assuming she gets out of here. Though it's looking increasingly likely that the way out will be via Kafra.)

"You broke into my office first! Anyway, I'd love to chat, but I think my employers might be stopping by soon. And I don't want them to find you here... well, I would say any more than you do, but you do probably feel more strongly about it than I do."

"I don't think that's a very proportionate response, you know." And, yeah, okay, time to die, it's really just an act of will and she's happy to learn she doesn't feel squeamish at all about wanting to die—

What's an act of will?

...dying. Dying is an act of will. It's a very simple trigger, attached to the enchantment that will bring her to the nearest Kafra office as soon as she's dead. Yes?

"Oh, do stop that."

He begins gathering his personal effects into an extradimensional storage box, starting with the desk itself.

...biting her tongue. Is that a thing she can do. She has heard about it before but she actually has no idea how one does this and it's gonna really hurt quite a lot but on the other hand she once threw acid at her own face so—wait, she still has the acid, can she in fact move, she will melt her face if she can.

She can bite her tongue, though it's hard to get through; she can't throw the acid. On account of how her arms aren't moving.

"If you bite your tongue off it'll just grow back," the young man sighs, touching the box to his safe. "I recognize the impulse to fight back in any way you still can, but please, wait until you have resources available, or at least think you do. This is just undignified."

"I really feel like it's more undignified to not exhaust every possibility."

...can she empty her green potion reserves into her bloodstream and then pump air into her veins? No, damnit, it's vacuum-sealed, there isn't any air. Okay, what about if she engages her thrusters at maximum force to hit a wall or ceiling hard enough to break her own neck?

No.

"Fine," he huffs, as her body goes numb. "Since I do want to leave you in good condition..."

She wakes up alone, in a tastefully if impersonally decorated bedroom. She's wearing her clothes, though not her enhanced legs. She lacks access to any implants she may have, especially her suicide trigger.

There's a wheelchair by her bedside. It's a fairly nice bit of work; the wheels are shiny and well-oiled, and the seat has a cushion.

Okay now she thinks it's time for her to feel fucking terrified.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck getting separated from her suicide trigger and her resurrection point was not meant to be something that could happen!!! How in Odin's name did, did he do that—

(She is coming up with all sorts of technological solutions to the problem, in the back of her mind, because that kind of thing just happens automatically. A sort of reverse trigger that she can enable, such that if she goes unconscious or releases a trigger it kills her? Being constantly poisoned and cured of the poison but the antidote stops if she stops wanting it there? All of that relies on her legs, what can she do that doesn't? It needs to be fast enough she can't be healed before she dies, so anything that just makes her bleed out doesn't work. A bomb of some kind? Some enchantment coordinated with some other piece such that if they're not both removed at the same time she dies? Maybe an enchanted tattoo...)

Lucky allows herself to be fucking terrified for five minutes.

Then she stops, and starts looking around and trying to take better stock of the situation. What's the room like? What are the decorations like? Lights? Door(s), window(s), walls, floor, ceiling? Is there anything here that'd allow her to kill herself (even without her resurrection point that's still better than ending up as one of Rekenber's experiments)?

(Gonie would be so sad...)

(...don't think about Gonie.)

(...he's definitely coming for her. There is nothing on Midgard that would prevent him from coming for her. She knows this, because if the positions were reversed, she'd do the same. She would walk to Hel and back for him.)

(That thought is... comforting. And grounding. All is not lost. She has Gonie.)

The room contains windows, which hum softly with protective wards. It contains some shelves, bolted into the walls, with various weighty tomes, none of them so weighty as to be usable for bludgeoning damage. (A few are contemporary romance; others are general fiction; there is one well-worn compilation of heroic sagas, the gilt edging thumbed almost completely off the pages.) It has one door, which is closed.

The room doesn't actually seem to have been stripped of any items that would pose a suicide risk. If nothing else, the bedsheets are very nice, but not actually sturdier than very nice bedsheets are supposed to be.

Before much headway can be made on investigating sheet-rope construction, though, a little creature enters the room, bearing a tray piled high with breakfast. It's bipedal, with proportions not unlike a human child, but its face is a nacreous mask without any apertures below its strangely lovely blue eyes.

It blinks at her, lays the tray on her bedside table, and bows.

What... is this. Is this one of Rekenber's horrible experiments. A... very polite... horrible experiment... She's seen the kinds of results of their experiments here and there, the more deadly ones. They don't look... cute? They don't look cute.

"Thank you," she says almost automatically, eyeing the tray. The thought of being suspicious of the food lasts barely a fraction of a second before she has the obvious followup thought of if that guy had wanted to further poison her she had not been in any shape to resist up until now, so she'll eat.

Can she actually reach the heroic sagas, on her chair?

Yes! If she looks closely, she can see the shelf was recently moved down by a few feet; the old mount has been taken off, but the marks on the wall are still there.

Breakfast is really good. There are eggs with brilliantly, violently orange yolks; a slab of bacon, with the golden fat veined through the meat instead of pooling at the edges; fluffy, crisp mushroom tartlets like she might see at a restaurant determined to serve 'authentic Schwarzwald cuisine' to people too rich to want anything of the sort.

There's also a plate of less traditional offerings. Various light pickles, ranging from cucumber to fish to raw meat. A root vegetable shaped extraordinarily like a little man with an open mouth, which has been deep-fried and glazed with honey and red pepper.

A bowl of snow, flavored with fruit syrup and little crystalline drops of honey.

(She might have encountered the last before - snow-sweets are traditional on feast days in nearby Lutie, and sometimes made in hot, arid places like Arunafeltz as a display of wealth. They're less popular in Schwarzwald, where snow is nothing special and it falls already half blackened.)

What... is that root. Is that a mandragora root. She did not know mandragoras were edible.

They are. And everything tastes... really good? Um. "Hey, uh, little guy, do you speak? Or, I guess, could you fetch—" He never gave her his name. "—your master? At least I assume he's your master, maybe not, but then whoever sent me these things I guess? Or, um, someone?"

The manikin points eloquently at its not-having-a-mouth, and its shoulders tremble in a way that implies that if it did have a mouth, it would be giggling. Then its long-fingered hands flicker through a series of signs, clearly not expecting her to understand but communicating something anyway, and it takes its leave.

...wait it could just straightforwardly understand her? She is dreadfully curious but also having feelings of dread.

The man from before enters. His hair is slightly damp, and instead of his business attire he's wearing a nice though not fancy tunic and some sturdy leggings. He smiles at her.

"Good morning, sleepyhead. Though I won't try to say that wasn't my fault."

"Good morning. You never told me your name."

"I didn't, did I."

There's a meaningful pause.

"Oh, whatever. I'm Thoma. Though at the office, I'm more usually the Necromancer."

"The... Is that a self-appointed title or...?"

"Mm. Somebody called me that when I was starting out, and I... took to it. Encouraged the nickname to spread. Nowadays hardly anyone outside of payroll even knows my name."

The manikin from earlier comes out from behind his leg, flashing him a rapid series of signs. He looks down and signs something back, then flicks it in the forehead. It shiver-giggles again.

"Well, I would love to say it's nice to meet you, Thoma, but the circumstances aren't the best. Um. Why are you called that, and was that little guy at one point a person who died or something?"

"I brought a man back from the dead, why else? He wasn't dead long, and he didn't do well after, but it was a breakthrough. The little guy," whom he lifts onto his hip, "was never anything other than he was. He's one of three, I'm sure you'll meet the others."

"Isn't there a spell for that? The bringing people back from the dead part."

"There is. But I didn't use a spell. Nor did I use a Skill. I used a simple chemical formula, which I made, which anyone could make with the right tools."

He glances at the breakfast plate and pulls out a pair of sticks, about the length of a pencil, with the hand that isn't holding his homunculus. "Mind if I have some of the pork sashimi? Ari brought your breakfast first."

"This is too much food for me," she says, while her brain processes the other thing he said. "Wouldn't it be easier to reverse-engineer the Skill? ...I guess maybe not easier but more complete? Then anyone could do it too. ...maybe it'd cost too much mana, though. And you'd need a cooperative priest, probably. You know, if it weren't for the part where presumably you or your company had kidnapped and killed that person that sounds like a pretty good research agenda." Which is basically the whole entire problem Rekenber has, as far as she can tell, "pretty good research agendas" coupled with horrifying methods. "And I bet you could do a hybrid thing, some easy Skill that can make up the difference after you use the chemical formula to bring the person back..."

"I believe we have someone on that, actually! A Skill to reconstruct the parts of someone that die, when they die, that the Formula can't bring back." Thoma pinches the strip of white-pink meat between his sticks and lifts it to his mouth. He chews for exactly five seconds, then swallows.

"And, yes, the Churches of Odin and Freyja enjoy their joint monopoly on healing and resurrection far too much for us to perform a properly comprehensive study on their Skills. And, yes, I kidnapped the man I killed and brought back. Would it help you to know that he beat his wife and ran a cockfighting ring out of his basement? He did. The loss of his faculties was not, particularly, a loss to the world."

"That does help, actually, but I know for a fact that's not the only kind of person you kidnap and kill."

"No, of course not. The profit margins on assessing them would be indefensible."

There's irony in his tone, not bitter so much as fondly exasperated.

"I can't tell if you're not being serious or if you really don't care or what."

"...I am being serious, to the extent that's relevant. Many of my superiors at Rekenber care very deeply about money, and any plan to do something more ethically at a cost in zeny and efficiency would die unborn. The rest are monsters or fools. I am probably a monster, but I am not a fool. And I care about people dying, but... mm. How to explain it."

He absently strokes the homunculus along the seashell-curls atop its head, and it looks like it might purr, if it had a voice.

"I do try not to kill people when I don't have to. It's a maximization problem - I imagine you know them? Unless those mechanical trousers were a gift from a friend."

"They were not a gift from a friend. Can I have them back, by the way, I kind of outgrew chairs a while ago."

"Put a pin in it, ask me in five minutes, we'll talk about it. Do you already how maximization works."

"Yes, I do."

"Thanks. I'm maximizing on not killing people, but that's not the only factor. I also have to consider leverage, which comes in many forms, like 'becoming a more powerful alchemist' and 'not inspiring anyone at Rekenber to have me dumped into the Roterfluss in pieces'. And, of course, my terminal goal. Which is weighted very heavily. So, when I balance all of those out... I prefer to experiment on those I've personally evaluated and kidnapped, when at all possible. When it isn't possible, I put a mark in the moral expenses column. I don't try to change Rekenber's internal policies on subject acquisition, because that would be a great deal of effort and danger without significant expected reward. That's an ongoing moral expense, though only a small one, since I'm really not very well positioned to affect the situation. And... to get back to the earlier point.

"I care about killing innocents. It's inconvenient for my goals, and I think it's bad. It'd be convenient if my superiors didn't make me. But it doesn't serve my goals to get upset about it."

"Why is it inconvenient? What are your goals?" If the villain wants to monologue who's she to stop him, the more he talks the more time she has before whatever he's got planned for her begins.

"It's inconvenient because my goals are, fundamentally, about making the world a better place. Killing innocents makes the world a worse place. Like I said, it's red ink under moral expenses."

She blinks and... doesn't actually have something to say to that. That sounded far, far too much like what a villain from a novel would say and she's having some trouble wrapping her head around it.

"Anyway. You want your legs back. Very understandable. I would like you to have your legs back as well. I would not like you to try using them to crush my skull, or spray burning accelerant at me, or disassemble them and construct a teleportation device so you can leave and tell whoever you'd like to tell about all of the things you saw in the laboratory. And I'm quite confident you could modify them to do any of those things, if you could make them in the first place. So we find ourselves at cross-purposes.

"Would you like to impress me by coming up with a solution?"

"...I can just not do any of that? It would be—" How does she put this. "If I were the kind of person who'd screw over someone who had helped me less than they could, using the exact thing they helped me with, that wouldn't result in me being helped more in the long run, would it?"

"In the long run? What long run? If you die here, Lucky, you don't pop back up at Kafra, telling everyone how you stuck to your principles. You die."

"Okay but that's... you can't just throw away the kind of person you are just because you might die? That just means that you aren't that kind of person in the first place. And, yeah, that too, if I try to be funny you could kill me or worse so if you want to just trust that part that works too."

"...good enough, I think." He sets the homunculus down, and it runs off.

"...oh, score, that worked. And by the way I could not create a teleportation device with what I've got in those legs. At least not quickly, I'd have to figure out how to use those crystals for that and I really don't think they're at all specced for it."

"As if I know that! I'm a biochemist, not omniscient."

"Not with that attitude!" she chirps and then wonders why the hell she just said that to the evil scientist. She does not want the evil scientist to be omniscient. "...anyway, you were saying your goals are making the world a better place...?"

"Yes! You may have noticed that it's shit."

"Yes, I have." Due to things like, for example, evil megacorporations too powerful to bow down to the law that treat people like objects. Not that she's going to say that.

"I can't do much about the social issues. People will continue to be bastards forever, because the fundamental nature of thinking creatures existing is that they want different things from one another and they're bastards about it. But what I can do something about is... making sure that the problems aren't things like Surt has just set everything on fire. Or the harvest failed, and I'm going to starve to death. Or, for that matter, I'm going to die. Ever. From anything."

Is he a mind reader or something.

"And to do that you kill people," she replies instead.

"You did hear my little diatribe about red ink and the inefficiency of trying to change company policy, I saw the face you made about it. I kill people, and it's bad and unpleasant and counter to my goals, but without doing so I stand no chance of actually achieving my goals."

"Yeah but it sounded a lot like the kind of thing a villain from a book would say and you didn't really give me and reason to think the ways those fail don't apply to you? Like even if you don't assume that a miracle from the gods will happen in the form of a protagonist who just happens to solve everything the well-intentioned villain was working on in a way the villain couldn't possibly have predicted or accounted for that's not the only reason those villains are wrong."

"Hm. Say more? Your perspective is valuable, because I hardly ever speak to anyone intelligent who isn't also a storybook villain; Rekenber, you know. If you've worked out a fatal flaw in my approach I'll be surprised, but very grateful."

"Seriously? I mean, okay, give me a minute, I didn't expect you to take me up on it, I'll need to think, but the first one is I guess that most people who think they did the maths right actually didn't and are ignoring things like, I dunno, asking for help from other people who value the same thing just as much and who might be able to pool resources in a way that catalyses into ending up costing less in the long run plus there's you know even if you're very smart and think you did the maths right you should suspect that there are things you didn't think of that other people will because everyone is biased—"

She forcibly presses her lips together.

"Give me a bit to think."

"I am very good at maths." But: lip-locking gesture.

Ari the homunculus returns with two others, bearing between them: legs!

The other two homunculi are not identical to their conspecific, but they do look fraternal. One has batlike wings and a pair of coral lips curving in a not-quite-uncanny smile. The third has two sets of arms, one set longer and equipped with butcher-knife claws, one closer to the chest with long, nimble fingers. (Also a long, swishing tail with a stinger on the end the size of a dagger.)

!!!!

Her legs!!!!

"Okay break in thinking for legs." Assuming she has the ability to use magic again she will cast a little not-Spell on the legs and they will obligingly float towards her and then kneel so that she can get herself into them.

The homunculi mutely offer their assistance, but not insistently.

No no it's fine she can do it herself she's just gotta hyup and then she floats around the perimeter of the room twice before settling back near where she was. "Oh, I missed you," she sighs fondly.

Ari the homunculus stretches out his arms in the universal gesture for upsies!

...sure. She can do that.

(The result of probably-unethical experiments is oddly endearing. She wonders if it's on purpose.)

"You indulge him terribly," Thoma notes. "He'll be insufferable."

"I'm sure," she says, rolling her eyes.

...then she puts him back down and hums.

"Okay so the stuff I said is, like, a good start? You're smart, fine, sure; you are not that smart. Just, full stop, there's millions of people out there, even if you're individually smarter than each of them you've got biases and blind spots and habits of thought and even when you think you've corrected for them you haven't because that's not what a blind spot is. If you say, sure, actually you've got a whole network of people who are all checking each other's work on this then I guess that's addressed but it wasn't my impression."

"That is what Rekenber's for," Thoma points out. "To an extent. We're all villains, but we're not all the same villain."

"Is Rekenber trying to save the world? You said they were trying to make money."

"Ah - no, many of the people working there want to improve life as we know it, it's just that in aggregate that adds up to a black-iron money-machine greased with blood. I just meant I have them check my work, sometimes, generally a bit sideways so nobody suspects what I'm actually doing."

"I don't mean check your work I mean check your goals and methods! I mean have someone who is also in the business of killing Surt and who can do maths!"

"I don't know that you'd make a good secretary, but I can't say your pitch isn't convincing."

"I'm not going to be your secretary but I wouldn't be having this chat if I weren't trying to convince you to get someone else to—put a pin on that."

Agreeable nod. "Pinned."

"Anyway! Number two. You're ignoring second-order effects, and don't try to say you aren't 'cause of course you are, it's not computable in polynomial time or if it is the exponent is huge. Obviously I can't compute them either but that's why you get, like—that thing I said earlier. About how if I act to stab people who help me in the back just because they didn't help me literally as much as possible then I don't get any help at all and I don't get to keep my brain where it is when evil scientists want to experiment on me? 

"That thing is like, like being reliably some kind of person, some person people can cooperate with because you're, like... you don't just do whatever you want? If you just do whatever you want based on your red ink or whatever then the only way people can predict you is if they know you super well to actually be able to predict you entirely. 

"...I'm not explaining this well. It's like why we have laws—kinda—no I mean it totally is, if it were better to not have laws and just live completely independently of everyone then that's what people would do but it's better to live in society because we can use society and the kinds of rules we get because those rules are made out of the ways ignoring second-order effects came back to bite us in the ass. Collectively."

Her speech gets progressively more animated and she gesticulates wildly, barely looking at him or paying attention to him. Once she gets going she gets going. "And obviously I'm not saying you shouldn't ever break rules, or that all rules are good or whatever, the process isn't perfect. But it's a compounding thing, the more rules you break—and not just laws, I mean rules of living with other people and common decency and not being a villain—the more rules you break the more reason you need to have to break them! It's a probability thing, like a compound, you know, it doesn't, it's not the same as, breaking one really bad rule doesn't make breaking all of the other rules not cost anything. And when you break as many rules as you're doing, as Rekenber is doing, then the other people who are working to kill Surt look at you and don't see a potential ally, they see a villain that they have to stop or would have if they didn't have a ton of other stuff on their plates, and that circles back to the first point."

Thoma stares in delight as she gets going. When she reaches the stopping point, he claps lightly.

"– may I lay out my own thoughts on your point?" he asks. "I don't know if you want to finish out your argument before counterpoints."

"No, go ahead." She needs to catch her breath anyway.

"Excellent. My counterpoint is that I am evil. I am dispositionally incapable of following any societal rule, especially the ones that matter. And you have left out an important point, namely that I receive asymmetrical advantages from being evil just as you do from being... whatever you are, nice I suppose. If I were not evil, I wouldn't have nearly the number of human corpses or live subjects to experiment on. I wouldn't have Rekenber's resources. I might be obligated not to use some particular solution to the Surt problem if it offended the sensibilities - I'd be surprised if killing him involved trapping his spirit in a human child who then suffered agonies for the rest of time, but it's not the sort of thing I like to rule out, you know?"

He scoops up the knifier homunculus in his excitement, petting its needle-hair in exactly and only the correct direction. "I have further thoughts. But I imagine you also have further thoughts. Please continue, this is immensely helpful."

She kinda doubts it but whatever she's not really expecting this to work even if he's indulging her she's just buying time. ...well not just but at least in large part. 

"I call bullshit. Sure, maybe you have a disposition or whatever, but you're still human and can still control your own actions or create ways to do it. And that's, you know, exactly the thing I mean by having people check you? And either your goal is killing Surt or it isn't, saying that it's killing Surt but also you like hurting babies is you just deluding yourself because you want to do whatever you feel like doing. And I guess you can, if you want, but that's the sort of thing that'll obviously get you killed because even if life's not a novel it still has people who can sucker punch Surt and survive and those people often—I already said this.

"And like—governments make decisions that kill people too? And not just them, hospitals do too. And sure, Schwarzwald's government is also evil but I hear there are ones that aren't. And if there aren't there should be. And hospitals aren't evil, mostly, I'm pretty sure, and they do red ink maths all the time and that's what it looks like when you're trying to save people and you have to make choices that'll definitely kill some of them."

"Mm - you misunderstand me, I think. I don't 'like hurting babies'. I just... don't have the kind of moral instinct that lets people operate in society. Red ink is the closest I get, and I had to pull it out of a dream. You're right, that it doesn't look like what good people do."

"You don't need instinct you just need rules. Or—not social ones. Personal ones. If you pulled the red ink out of a dream then you can take the next step, you can make yourself into a tool to achieve your goals." Otherwise what are you for? What is anyone for? "Figure out a sort of—there's two kinds of things to do, right? You can try to decide, on the fly, what you'll do, every time, always be calculating the 'best' way to get what you want, or you can be the type of person who gets what they want, and I don't mean play a role that's aesthetically inspired by people's idea of successful people, I mean figuring out what kinds of stable—algorithms—procedures—you need to have that'll make you reliably get there. And obviously I think this is better than the other thing or I wouldn't be talking about it but one of the reasons is that it works even under pressure, even when you don't have time to think because a huge disgusting insect with too many legs got attached to your face. You can fall back into someone who will get what they want even—

"You're good at maths. It's being able to look for global optima, not just local ones, in your optimisation function."

He pets the sharp homunculus some more. The winged one flaps over from circling Lucky, to perch on his shoulder and pat his head. Ari is still shivering happily in her arms, but he starts shivering a little less happily.

Thoma himself slowly loses his facial expression. It's odd to watch. He frowns, and then it leaches away, until the tension in his jaw is the only muscle working in his face.

"...she didn't know any better than I did," he says. His voice is just as blank. "The one with the red ink. She'd been told some rules, and... she cared about someone. Enough to follow the rules. But I don't have weights for an algorithm. She had someone doing all of that for her."

...that feels important. Like, beyond the way he's getting all serious, that feels important. "She?" The one with the red ink. "The one you dreamt about?"

"Yes. ...I dream about her, but she wasn't a dream. The dream doesn't know names, but I saw a particular battle and looked her up. Yrsa. One of the first true alchemists. Sister to the lord of Heorot."

...he dreams someone real? That sounds like something out of a novel.

But entertaining the idea for a moment... "There's a part of me that's like... Look I'm not stupid. I know you're just humouring me because you find me interesting. But I meant everything I said. And if you went, fine, I want to try this being good thing, then I—don't want to punish you for making that decision? And you've got enough resources that you'd be really useful if you were properly—cooperating. And I'd want to enable that. If I could."

That gets an expression out of him. "I am not humoring you. Do you know how godsdamned hard it is to find someone intelligent, who knows how to explain ethics, and who already has too much confidential information to be allowed to live such that I can actually tell them anything? Obviously I kidnapped you to evaluate whether to experiment on you, but this is much more important than that."

"Well I guess I won't be able to help very long then if you're gonna kill me regardless but fine, ask me anything about ethics." She is so not qualified for this but she's been doing things she's not qualified for for years. Someone has to and not enough qualified people are around.

"I may or may not actually kill you," he clarifies. "You have too much information to live by Rekenber's standards, but no one except me knows you were there and if I can satisfy myself that you can keep an oath not to use this intelligence against me I might just let you go. And depending on how well you convince me, I may find myself needing to sabotage Rekenber to make up for my own sins, in which case it wouldn't matter in the slightest."

"...of course you can trust me to keep an oath, weren't you listening—" It's reasonable for people to doubt words your say under threat of death, Lucky. "Okay, maybe you can't trust my words that far I guess but if I make a promise I keep it. I claim. It's—so the, like, failure of my philosophy is that a lot of it isn't possible to verify, right? The next time an evil scientist kidnaps me they won't know that I cooperated with this one, but—it still matters and still translates to other parts of my life and if in general I act like this then anyone who pays attention will notice, you know? Which I guess you wouldn't since it's not like I'm famous or anything. But still, it's important."

"Lucky, I have absolute faith that you're smart enough to say that. And it certainly helps, in that if you hadn't already made the suggestion for your legs back I probably would be experimenting on you. But, as you say: I need to pay attention. And that may take a little while."

"Yeah, yeah," she sighs. "So, what, am I to be kept as a pet until you're sufficiently sure of my honesty or whatever? And in case you aren't I get experimented upon and/or killed, so I'll have a lot of incentive to keep acting honest even if I don't mean it?"

Man, she really should learn how to shut up sometime.

"If you don't mean it," Thoma says, "please do lie to my face. Nothing could end this test more quickly."

"If you're such a good lie detector then what's the point of the test?"

Shut uuuuuuuup Luckyyyyyyyyy.

"There is, actually, a difference between believing in a philosophy of oathkeeping, and actually being someone who will keep an oath under all foreseeable conditions. The former, I've already determined to be true. The latter will be difficult to confirm without personally torturing you. Which would be –" he mimes checking a small cheat-card "– wrong. So I need to determine the kind of person you are by other means. So you will be my honored guest, for a time."

"Fine," she sighs. "Do I at least get to tinker with my legs? I had ideas I wanted to try to implement and I'll die of boredom if I'm locked in this room."

"Swear you won't use it against me? I suppose I could count that under the earlier oath, but it seems good to be on the same page. Also, you have the run of the house, caveat ask me about any locks."

"I swear I won't use it against you. Or to try to escape, that'd be dickish too."

"It'd certainly put me in an awkward position," Thoma agrees. "Ari, since you've got a new favorite human, would you care to show her around?"

Ari nods vigorously.

"Terrific. Is anything else immediately relevant?"

"Um. Guess not? You said house so we're not in the lab?" That'll make mounting rescues harder but she believes in Gonie.

"Oh! Gods, no. I don't take overtime. I bought this cottage a few years ago and fit it with equipment for my diabolical purposes. But only the recreational ones."

"That's nowhere near distinguishing, you know. Alright, then," to Ari, "lead the way?"

Ari, once she sets him down, is happy to do so.

Cottage does not really describe this building in any language Lucky's familiar with. It could house two parents, two children, and at least three grandparents if the rooms were all equipped with beds; bunking more than one non-parent to a room, it would be more. The kitchen is well-appointed, as the breakfast would lead her to expect. There are two water closets, equipped with borderline futuristic conveniences. There's a study, and a small chemical laboratory. Several rooms are, as promised, locked.

The front door isn't.

"Is there a front yard I'm allowed to visit or is this a test?" she wonders.

Ari shakes his head and pushes on the door. (It opens inward.)

"...okay I don't know if that means I'm allowed to go out and you just got confused about the direction the door opens to or if I'm not allowed out."

Push!!!!!

Wait.

Frown.

Point at the doorknob. (It's slightly too high up for homunculus hands. Probably this is not an accident.)

Pull?

Open!

They are not in Regenschirm. The air is fresh; the sky is blue; the clouds are white. There are gentle rolling hills.

—blue sky and white clouds is novel, where are they, gosh she's never seen a place so, so clean—

Ari goes a-frolicking.

She can't frolick, exactly, but she can zooooom around the place and look around, the air is so fresh, there's no smoke—

If she zooms too far in any given direction, she may notice an odd feeling of dread.

—right of course there's something stopping her. "I'm not trying to run away!" she calls, because she's not gonna let that stop her from enjoying it, she can run perimeters without hitting against the barrier of dread too much once she's mapped it.

It recedes very cooperatively when she retreats. She's free as a bird. In some respects.

Eventually she does get tired of this, though. Is there more house she needs to be shown?

Nope! (Ari requests additional upsies.)

Alright alright he can get upsies.

But, um, she'd like to use the bathroom, if possible.

Well, is she going to say anything about it?

Yes, after a bit of upsiesing.

Pout. Dismount.

And then, bathroom!

She does what she needs to do, washes her hands, looks in the mirror, and—

—breaks down.

She has never been so terrified in her entire life, and now that the adrenaline of it has subsided and she's no longer distracted by the conversation it's hitting her that she's a prisoner, she's trapped here for however long, having to please that monster if she is to survive. The fact that she meant every word she said doesn't matter; she hasn't felt so fragile and vulnerable since she was small and living on the streets. Actually not even then, because then she felt like she'd be able to leave, if she tried.

Would adventuring be this bad? Risking life and limb for something seems less scary than this, even though she knew she was risking something like this. Hell, this is better than becoming one of the twisted monstrosities she's seen out there courtesy of Rekenber, unsure if they're even conscious or able to feel pain or notice what's happening around them, but that's a very low bar. The uncertainty makes it worse, the feeling like she's always being tested. She needs to figure out a way to kill herself if that looks to be the best way out for her, something the Necromancer can't stop or bring her back from. She won't wake up in Kafra, but she will at least still be herself to the very end.

Thinking of Gonie does help, but not as much as it did the first time. She's not in the lab anymore, she doesn't know if they even know where she'd be, they have no reason to look for her here. She wants to believe in him, wants to believe that he'd succeed at rescuing her, but she's not, she's not sure. And she doesn't know when it would happen, or how, or what to do. She'll try to occupy herself and not think this way, but right now?

Right now she's just afraid.

But eventually she manages to get herself under control, washes her face, psychs herself up, and floats out of the bathroom once more.

Ari appears to have been replaced by his sibling with the wings and the lips! Which flaps up and sits on her shoulders, piggyback style.

Oh um okay? She's kind of still a bit emotionally frazzled but it is very cute. 

"...I'm not sure what to do next though."

She receives a little kiss on the top of the head.

The manikin then points towards her bedroom and makes a noise like pages turning, then an inquisitive "mm?"

"...you can make book noises—right. Yeah, okay?" Bedroomwards?

Tinkling glass noise!

The bedroom is as she left it; the breakfast tray is in a keep-fresh circle, in case she wants any more. The books are still where they were.

Alright well sure, maybe she should read the well-worn heroic sagas that are probably about the person Thoma Glider dreams about. Or rather her brother, lord of Heorot, wherever that is? Anyway, she's sure it'll be useful.

The tale of Beowulf isn't bookmarked, but the spine is slightly cracked; it'll open there if she just sets it down.

Some versions of the story end up bowdlerized to be less horrible and confusing, perhaps even have a moral. This one has not suffered that fate. Beowulf sails to Heorot, seeking the mother who was stolen from his crib-side. He meets instead the lovely but cold Yrsa, whose mother died in birth and whose father has just been slain by the beast Grendel; she promises her hand to the hero if he will take revenge. He goes, and there's the usual welter of heroic slaughter, after which he returns with Grendel's head. The two are wed and ascend the throne, building the feasthall into a grand citadel, producing half a dozen heirs.

Harassed by neighboring kingdoms, they bring them to heel and expand their own turf. When a dragon tries to claim tribute, the pair find its lair and slay it, returning with gold and jewels. But one day a war-party of monsters, none the equal of Grendel but all great and terrible in their own right, pour from the mountains and lay siege to the castle. Beowulf and Yrsa emerge, barely victorious, to seek the source.

They find it. A cave hidden in the Black Mountain, and within, a laughing crone. She has been waiting for them; she introduces herself as the ides aglæcwif, the mother of Grendel; then as Olof, mother of Yrsa; and then as Hygd, mother of Beowulf. She was raped and kidnapped by Beowulf's father, and by Yrsa's in turn, and so she grew to hate mankind. Using a potion she posed as a corpse, then dug out of her grave and ran from all civilization. She lay with the beasts of the forests, creating Grendel. Grendel took his vengeance for her plight, but he was slain for it. And so she fled further, and made a thousand more like him. Indeed, even now they waited for the signal to fall upon the kingdom – a signal the witch lights as brother-king and sister-queen stand dumbly before her.

Beowulf runs to mobilize his berserkers. Yrsa stays, battling the witch to their mutual death. Beowulf is slain atop a mountain of his monstrous half-siblings. The witch's remaining children are dispatched, with a terrible price in blood, by their cousins the heirs to the throne. Only one is left standing: Rolf, the last of the line, with his kingdom in ruins. He spends the next five years building barrows in the rubble; once each body is interred and every barrow full but one, he lies down in the tomb and drives his sword through his heart into the black earth.

...is this story... true...

What kingdom even is this, this must've been hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago? She's not totally familiar with the entire history of Midgard but she's sure the one Kingdom people talk about is Rune-Midgard.

Actually, scratch that, it's gotta be at least a thousand years ago, right? Before the elves left? Surely it must.

"Do you know where this story happened?" she asks before even checking whether there's anyone around who could reply, she was so distracted by reading she did not see the time pass nor pay any attention to such petty details like "whether there's anyone else in the room with her".

"Quite near here," Thoma calls from the hallway. "For certain values of happen."

"...I have no idea where we are so that answer is next to useless to me. Not anywhere near Einbroch I guess."

He comes in just enough to lean against the doorframe like an asshole. "Aldebaran. You should be just able to see Mt Mjolnir from here, if you get a hundred feet up."

"Oh wow. Uh." Somehow she did not consider the possibility that they'd have left Schwarzwald. "And, wait, what do you mean 'certain values of happen', I guess this is probably mostly legend then, do your dreams not align with it or...?"

"The general thrust is there, but legends exaggerate. Yrsa didn't offer her hand in exchange for Beowulf avenging her father; killing Grendel and marrying the man to do it was just the easiest way to shore up her claim to the throne without some cousin stepping in. The Mother of Monsters probably didn't lie with beasts, or if she did it was only recreational. And no, we – sorry. Beowulf and Yrsa didn't just stand there while the bitch recited a monologue. She did it while fending them off. Much more mythical, in my opinion, but nobody asked."

"Oh, that kinda stuff. Sure, but the important parts happened."

"I'm an incorrigible pedant. Yes, all of the important things happened – I have my doubts that Rolf actually killed himself, but it's not like Yrsa was there for me to see it."

"And Beowulf was your, uh, the person with the rules? Or hers, I guess? Who she cared about."

"Yeah. He always had an awful time whenever the rules in his heart didn't agree with the rules in his head, but at least he had both."

"Like—his moral intuitions not agreeing with what he thought on reflection was right? That's relatable."

"Mm. When someone had a really convincing argument that something was good, but he didn't really trust them, didn't like them, couldn't tell whether he only didn't trust them because he didn't like them..."

"Oh. Yeah. That makes sense.

"...do you ever wonder if he's—also alive, out there?"

"...yeah.

"I can't find one person in the entire world. Especially if he could be as different as I am from her."

"Are you really different from her? You said that—I mean, if she didn't have his rules?"

"Mostly I just meant that she was a woman, and blonde, and didn't look anything like me. And I've checked for long-lost siblings."

"Oh. Right. That." She'd been thinking of trying to find someone by their deeds but it's just now occurred to her that she bets this other person would not have predicted being an evil scientist so how would they even predict why their brother would be? 

...she's really buying the story wholesale, huh. Well, she supposes she might as well act as if it's true even if it's not, it's a good practice to inhabit the mindset of someone who does believe it at minimum to understand them better.

"And, you know, there's a few more heroes today than there were even a century ago."

Okay, seriously, is he reading her mind. AAAAALOUETTE, GENTILLE ALOUETTE, AAAAAAALOUETTE, JE TE PLUMERAAAAAI—

"No, I can't. – sorry, that's one of the faces I know too well to pass up."

"Faces."

"I have a knack for reading people, and I like to follow logical implications even when they're not relevant. You mentioned that I might not be as different from her as I thought, hence that Beowulf might be more self-similar still; I said that I meant physical similarity, and so you assumed I didn't understand what you'd meant in the first place, which I corrected while you were still thinking about it. Then you made the extremely specific face people make when they think I'm reading their minds. It's not exactly cold-reading, but it's still a bit of a party trick."

Beat.

"And, no, I'm very fun at parties."

"I'm sure you are. I've never been to one."

"What, never?"

"...my social circle is weird," she says, which conveys most of what she means without (hopefully) leaking too much.

"Ah, that'd explain it. My friends are all completely normal, as well you know."

The winged manikin makes a noise like jingling bells.

"I didn't mean you."

The bells intensify.

"Oh, shut up," Thoma laughs.

"If they go to parties they are probably more normal than mine," though she can't imagine this man particularly likes the rest of his social circle.

"You realize you make it harder to let you deflect when you say such intriguing things. Anyway, if you have any clever ideas how to find a long-lost sibling feel free to let me know. Until then, would you like to... what do people do... work on our respective projects in the same room? I've got some stuff that isn't very horrible at all, mostly agronomics."