He looks right at her, smiles, winks.

All right. She'll let him have this one. She looks away first, the corner of her mouth curling a little bit with unendorsed amusement.

If she's understanding the hints correctly, he's been on the bottom end of the power struggle for hundreds or even thousands of years; she doesn't need to grind him down to prove that she's in charge of the room. It's good that he still seems to have a sense of humor at all!

She trusts she got the message across, and if she didn't, she can always just terminate the session. Some people will test boundaries repeatedly.

"Moving on."

"So, Luka, what's your answer to my question? What would you want out of this therapy, if there were any actual hope of getting it? I'm interested in hearing about positive changes that you want, or total cut-off, if that's what you prefer. If you only want vengeance, you may say so briefly, but not in any detail, please."

He raises an eyebrow and hesitates.

"I want him to stop torturing people, especially me and people I care about. It would be useful if he died or if he stepped down from being in charge of certain things."

"When you say it would be useful if he were dead, is that because then you could be sure the torture was over? Or is there more to it than that?"

"Mostly things that are variations on that. Sure it was over, sure it wouldn't start again. Free, I suppose, of some miscellaneous things that are in my way. Not that no one else has ever tortured me, mind, just..." Luka shrugs. His voice is just a hair colder now.

"Is there a reason you're so vague, Luka? You talk about wishing Traveler would step down from certain things, and about being free of some miscellaneous things that are in your way. It would help me understand you if you could spell things out a bit more, but maybe there's a good reason you're talking like that."

"I'm not sure what kinds of noble titles you've heard of or what kinds of political divisions you've heard of... I want him to stop being in charge of our, uh, family? Country? I don't know what you call something that's halfway between those, or someone in charge of it - does 'I want him to stop being the chief of our tribe' make sense? I want to be able to talk to people that he orders around, and I want them to react however they want and not however he tells them to. Things like that. Our reputations usually precede us, so I can try listing names in case you recognize one."

"You are welcome to list names, but I've found that the greater interdimensional multiverse is a big place, and not very connected. Please do not be insulted if I am not already familiar with you and your people."

"If I were going to be insulted by you, I think I would start being insulted that you think trying to stare me down could possibly help you, you know, you're getting quite as much patience as I have just because I respect your expertise - anyway, though. I'm Luka the wise, or Sky, or Hawkschild, or Stonedweller, or quite a lot of other things."

Traveler is mostly just quietly maintaining very proper posture right now but he favors Luka with a faint little "oh, really" look.

"What about you, Traveler? Any other names you'd like me to know? Or information that might help me understand more about the dimension and world you're from?"

Luka's face twitches in a fast-fading grimace and he clenches his fists a bit.

"I could give you names you'd recognize if I cared to, which I don't, but I'm surprised that - well, I heard those names in translation, in English, but I didn't hear the name 'Luka' in translation, even though I know the languages all those names come from, and it's not as though Luka spoke modern English when I imprisoned him centuries ago - anyway, I do think I know this place. We're somewhere in North America, I would guess? It might be worth checking that this isn't somehow a copy of the world I think it is, but culturally, our divergences from North America are largely in the direction of being more... old-fashioned and violently inclined, relying more on personal relationships as opposed to bureaucracy, taking our promises more seriously," (Luka silently snarls) "and knowing somewhat more of magic and of the future and of the more dangerous worlds."

Should Ramona be able to guess who these people are? Luka certainly seemed to think so. She wrote that off at first as ego. You can be among the top ten most dangerous people from your planet and still not be that special; there are a lot of planets after all. But Traveler seems familiar with Earth, with its geography and languages, and that suggests that Ramona should maybe be thinking of Earth's ancient myths and religions for hints.

Then again, does it matter?

On the one hand, Ramona can work with their relational system without knowing very many specifics at all. It's more about the shape of the thing than about any of the details.

On the other, the more cultural context she has, the better she'll be able to make sense of them and why they're stuck in exactly this shape.

She's been woolgathering too long and she should say something out loud.

"I am surprised that you know anything of my world at all! Most of my clients don't, these days. And it seems we may be from more closely connected places than I previously guessed. Thank you for that background."

"So, to recap, in brief:"

"Luka, your top request is for Traveler to stop torturing people, especially you and yours."

"And Traveler, you want to find a way to -- disarm, to free each other's families -- and from there, fix what's been broken and potentially even collaborate in building a better world."

"But at the end, you said something interesting. You said you would like to understand Luka, and help restore what he's lost."

"It seems to me that understanding might be a good place to start."

"Traveler, what have you already tried, in your attempts to understand Luka's point of view?"

"I initially thought he seemed simultaneously emotionally needy and withdrawn after a time he was imprisoned and tortured, and in hindsight I never again saw him act quite exactly as he had before, but at the time I thought he would recover - of course I asked him about what had happened and made sure he wasn't cursed, but he didn't want to be frank with me or with any of his other friends after that, possibly with the exception of his wife but possibly not. Then - he came back from a trip, learned about his son's imprisonment, and seemed furious. Someone who was injured helping me imprison Luka's son suggested that we would be willing to make it up to Luka. It seemed to me that that made Luka angrier than I'd ever seen him, but he wouldn't answer questions. Understand that we didn't speak to each other in English and this is a translation, but he said 'I'll think about it' - " Traveler mimics Luka's prosody as well as his tone of voice, which was apparently very cold, almost hissed, and bitten off with the finality of a guillotine. " - and then left. I asked his wife to pass a note to him; he didn't answer it and she never confirmed to me that she actually gave it to him. Then..."

Traveler sighs. "I was distracted by my son's death. I didn't try much of anything for a time that your species would call very long. It was years later that we attended a party together where he walked away every time I asked him if we could talk, and told me to shut up when I asked - this is likewise a translation - 'you okay, man?' And then he killed one of the waitstaff and left and I didn't think I ought to go after him. He came back on his own to speak to me, but only loudly and in front of everyone, and he seemed to have come back specifically to insult and provoke people, so that, likewise, didn't seem like a good time to talk even before he claimed credit for my son being dead. Then he, ah, left the building in a very creative way and in a bit of a rush. After he was imprisoned, I visited him and asked if we could talk. He refused me." Traveler huffs a bit and shakes his head.

"Other than trying to speak with him, I have tried to have some empathy," he says in a tone and with a look at Luka that both very clearly imply unlike some people. "I have also tried discussing his behavior with other people who used to be his friends. I tried to spy on him, but he made that very difficult. I did not deliberately subject myself to torture just to have empathy for him, but I have been held captive and tortured myself, though not for so long. I don't think it helped, though I suppose a thousand years might help more. Seems inefficient to try that when I'm so busy, though." (This last bit is said with very dry humor and he looks Ramona in the eye and smiles slightly.)

Well, that's a lot. Where to even begin?

That Luka was 'needy' and 'withdrawn' and never acted the same again after being imprisoned and tortured seems... utterly unsurprising. The update here is not about Luka, but about Traveler, who apparently was surprised?

Ramona is also somewhat distracted by the bit about Luka killing the waitstaff at a party in what sounds like a fit of pique?

Overall Ramona is forming an impression that these two operate on some kind of different plane of existence. The long lifespans, the magic, the high-stakes interpersonal games, the thoughtless killing of probably-lesser beings.

It really does remind her mostly of Earth myths and legends. Are they Greek gods? Norse? Egyptian? Ramona is somewhat itching to diagram out the family trees she's learned about so far, along with the names that Luka gave her, and see if she can puzzle it out. But now is probably not the time.

The takeaway for now is about their psychology. She'll start thinking of them as the sort of child-men in the legends of old, the kind of people who would send snakes to kill a baby in its cradle, or dismember a rival sibling and scatter the pieces across the world.

She should focus in on the specific things Traveler actually did, in his attempts to understand Luka.

It sounds like he pestered him a bunch, but only after torturing him, and was miffed that Luka didn't want to talk. She should probably phrase it better than that.

"So you asked, multiple times and in multiple ways, but Luka let you know that he wasn't interested in talking. Fair enough. Luka is not obliged to explain anything to you, and if he doesn't want to participate in your understanding, then you might hit a dead end."

"Before I turn to Luka and ask for his take on that, one more question for you, Traveler. Luka said that he wants you to stop torturing people. What do you think? Is that a possibility?"

Ramona asks it lightly, the same way she'd ask if maybe a spouse could sometimes take out the garbage.

"I think I would grant him that if doing so wouldn't bring about the apocalypse."

Well, that's confusing. What do these two things have to do with each other?

"Is that... a serious ongoing concern? Something you need to keep a close eye on? Like, oh, sorry, I would have stopped torturing but," Ramona sucks her teeth, "impending apocalypse, you know how it is."

She's trying to keep the light, warm tone, despite the horrifying subject matter, and is not entirely sure she's pulling it off.

"Luka's child, whom I am imprisoning, and whom I cannot imprison less torturously without risking his escape, wants to extinguish the sun that gives us light. - It's a homophone in English," he tells Luka as an aside.

Extinguishing the sun. Well. That does seem bad. Also Ramona's last guess now feels too small. She can't recall any Greek gods powerful enough to extinguish the sun? And she doesn't know the other pantheons well enough from memory... are the other pantheons more badass than the Greeks? She just can't remember. She'll ask for more information.

"You can't imprison him without torturing him? Why is that?"

"We bound him with a custom-made magic item which does not allow him enough freedom of movement for his confinement to be humane according to my understanding of your local standards. We have now nearly exhausted our supply of the materials from which the magic item was made and could not, therefore, make an entire comfortably-sized room of similar strength. Among a few other reasons, but that's an important one."

Ramona has been ignoring Luka too long. There was a moment, a few exchanges ago, where she could have turned to Luka and asked him to stop dodging Traveler's questions, and she didn't do that because actually, dodging Traveler's questions seems entirely justified under the circumstances. She's hoping Luka noticed that and felt... well, not protected, exactly, she's getting the sense that these guys are too powerful to feel protected by a weak human. Maybe she's hoping he felt... defended.

But now she has to get his side of this whole "son extinguishing the sun" story. Which is going to sound a lot like asking him to explain himself.

Nothing for it. She takes a deep breath and dives in.

"Luka, I think it's entirely reasonable that you want the torture to stop, and I'd really like to help make that happen. Would you be willing to explain your side of this specific situation with your son? Is it really true that he wants to blot out the sun? And if so... do you want let him?"