Abused kid goes on adventure in Faerie, wants to stay. Should she be allowed to?

Does Aredhel know what she is getting into? In the blink of an eye, Emma won’t be the sweet young innocent who reminds her of her long-lost daughter; she will be a grown woman. I feel like Aredhel is projecting in a very dangerous way and how is she going to react when Emma inevitably fails to be the elf-daughter she is wishing for? How much experience or even natural instinct does she have dealing with traumatised creatures from a different species? I’d be worried about her losing interest and abandoning her. What kind of social services can the Prophet offer if Aredhel turns out to be a disastrous foster mum?

There’s the point that no matter how bad she is, she couldn’t be worse than Emma’s own mother. I know hardly anything about how our foster system works, but I feel sure that Emma would be taken into care once DOCS found out. Our foster care is probably not that great, but survivable and Aredhel’s could be anything from awesome to terrible.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Aredhel is probably not going to make a good human-mother. She has no knowledge of human nature, no one who does to advise her or support her and her reasons for wanting to adopt seem very iffy to me. It would be heart-breaking to take Emma away, but I think Emma would probably have a better life back in the human world. The fantasy trip that she can never talk about (except to me) would be a bit of a problem, but in the books when it happens, the kids seem to understand that that was a different world, and they need to set it aside and live in their own world so hopefully that is something intrinsic to the nature of cross-world adventures. They blur in your memory, like a dream or something.

She’s not a non-combatant. I’ll bring pictures/xrays/magical holograms of what she did to a child. And maybe slip Bernie a bottle of scotch to drop the reins on her dragon for a bit. Oopsie.

Crush the bitches and the boyfriends heads myself, but can I have a venti redeye and a tiramisu also?

Sure, prophet. In a word, no. I don’t know you, I don’t know the mother who wants to adopt her after one month, and I’m not permanently leaving a ten year old as a castaway in another universe she’s been in for one month. If “God’s policy” won’t respect Emma’s wishes, why should I respect God’s policy, and you imposing it? Why are God’s wishes paramount to hers? People not respecting Emma’s wishes has been a problem in the past, and I’m not comfortable leaving her in a situation she won’t ever be able to remove herself from. You’re telling me I should leave her in this world under your care and never, ever have a way to ever check on her again, I should just trust you and your rainbows and unicorns? How do I know this isn’t Hell? Why should I trust your adoption system sight unseen? How do I know the woman who wants to adopt her didn’t beat the “spitting image” daughter to death? I know if she returns she’ll be safe with me, how do I know she’ll be safe with you? Too much I don’t know to just sign off and walk away, sorry. Love your boob armor, though. Watch out for your unprotected stomach.

But it’s Emma’s wish to stay…

Or ‘staying in the fantasy realm’ is a metaphor for ‘being already dead in the real world’.

I wanted to post that. Darn it. On topic: I guess one thing it depends on is how similar elf/dwarf/hobbit/whatever nature is to human nature. I mean, if there’s a race there which is as human-like as the Hobbits from LotR, then it would be a lot easier, should the elves take ill care of her, to find someone who more fits her nature. Hell, maybe the elves are at least somewhat humanish, or “get” her. Being stuck in a constant state of culture shock can be rough.

On the other hand, though, she’s still a kid. There’s no telling that she wouldn’t be able to adapt to whatever environment is given by the time she’s an adult. Puberty is hard, but humans are very resilient and able to adapt to many things. It’s almost certainly going to be easier to deal with than constant physical and sexual abuse. So let her stay if she wants. It could be a lot worse, and at least this way she doesn’t have to pretend that this never happened.

Is this some sort of weird reverse-psychology stratagem to persuade the Prophet to let Emma stay by insulting the Prophet, and her world?

As MrDibble points out, disregarding Emma’s wishes means sending her home, not letting her stay in Pangaea. And the Prophet is looking for a way to help the kid, when it’s pretty clear she, the Prophet, thinks that a strict interpretation of her God’s rules might require her to be sent home and left to your city’s authorities to assist. And the Prophet doesn’t require your trust or permission. You’re the one in an alien world who needs help getting home. Lastly, assuming she wasn’t annoyed enough by your diatribe to dismiss your judgment entirely, the Prophet will likely respond to your remark about checking up on Emma to mean that, if she sends you both back, you will take personal responsibility for for making sure Emma is not only removed from the abusive household but also that she gets the legal and therapeutic help she surely needs. Are you willing to promise that? (And remember, she can truth-spell you, and probably will.0

Reading this, it occurs to me that Aredhel (the elf-maid–seriously, is no one going to remark on the Silmarillion reference?) is setting herself up for a fall. Emma probably has another century left to live, tops, which Aredhel may experience as being only a couple of months. She’s going ot get her heart broken again very quickly, by elvish standards.

And (speaking now as OP rather than poster), I’ll say that you’re right that the Prophet is worried about the difference in psychologies between Emma and any Pangaean species.

Just because I didn’t remark on the Silmarillion reference doesn’t mean I didn’t get it, friend. :wink:

My worry with letting her stay is that there’s more to healing from such abuse than simply making it stop.
If I said she’d be best back on Earth, I’m happy that I could let Social Services know the situation and, whilst they wouldn’t take my word for it (as far as they are concerned, of course, I don’t know Emma and have never had any contact with her before), they would investigate the situation. If it was as bad as the hot prophet lady was suggesting, then I have no doubt that she would be taken into care and given the psychological help she needs. Whilst that kind of help may be available in Pangaea, it won’t be specifically for a human’s specific psyche. On the other hand, that puts her at the mercy of the foster and adoption system. I think I’m right in saying that 10yr olds don’t get adopted much, and this page bears that out - just 2% of the children adopted in 2012/13 were over 10, but 36% of the children in care were 10-15. So she’s likely to either go to foster homes or into the care home system.

But she does want to stay. I voted for “I’d let her stay”, mostly because kids are resilient and I think resentment over the life she could have had could very well poison the rest of her life - and it’s going to be difficult for psychologists to get to the root of that, since they won’t believe the Pangaea story.

I seriously never got the impression from Tolkien that the Elves lived at any faster pace, or perceived time any differently, than humans.

There are no scenes in LOTR, at least, in which the reader is granted access to an elf’s thoughts the way we are granted introspective to hobbit and even Dwarf musings. But Legolas does comment, in talking about (I think) either Rohan or Fangorn forest, that the leaves have fallen there 500 times in his lifetime, which feels like nothing to him but is far more than a lifetime to Dwarves, Dunedain, and hobbits. He also calls Gimli and the others “children.” And someone in Rivendell notes that to them, Bilbo and Aragorn are more similar to one another than either is to an elf.

Elves are still children into their 40s or 50s, I think. The little elf-girl who vouched for Turin (may his beard grow inward!) in the Saeros incident was an adolescent when he arrived in Doriath around 12 or so, and was still an adolescent when he left a decade or so later.

If I am a single person in this scenario, I’d counter with an offer that I would stay myself as Emma’s human guardian.

If I were married, I’d lobby hard for that gate to open and let my husband in, and then we’d BOTH stay in magic land as Emma’s human family.

If that wasn’t an option, I’d have to say send Emma back, and I’d do my best to intercede for her (up to and including some homicide - I can handle jail, and I have a network of friends that would have Emma’s back while I was in lockup).

Elf-maiden may mean well, but humans have teeny short lives, and abused humans have psychological issues that she’s not in any way qualified to deal with. She sees Emma as a replacement daughter, and that’s never going to happen.

With me (and possibly a husband) as Emma’s real family, and Elf-maiden as her loving elven godmother/auntie, Emma’s got both a family to help her recover her stability, and a relative to spoil her rotten.

If the Prophets are concerned about the possibility of a human population infesting their lovely realm, I’m good with being sterilized, as is my husband (I asked) and they can ask Emma about it when she reaches her majority (but even so, with her as the only fertile human, her influence will breed out eventually if she is even fertile at all with the shifters or elves.)

I’d be respectful and keep my comments on her attire to my inner monologue, but I’d be pointed in my reply. Again, this is a little ridiculous because I’m applying a real world calculus to how I’d solve a real world problem in a fantasy question, but hey, you asked, and I can’t figure out how to back out now.

The problem is that the fantasy intersects a very real problem in reality: children here in the real world have been removed from horrible abuse only to be placed in even worse abusive situations in foster homes, and due to negligent or no oversight have suffered monstrous abuses. The hypo assumes that the “Prophet” and adoptive family obviously and unquestionably has nothing but the child’s best interests at heart, but the reality is that that is a dangerous, awful assumption. Courts employ men like Oakminister to investigate and repeatedly follow up on whether those children are being taken care of. To be blunt, when oversight was negligent or absent, children have died in foster care. That makes me a bit reluctant to sign off on “the Prophet’s” plan sight unseen with no oversight and no followup. We don’t do that in the real world for very real reasons, and if I somehow found myself in the situation of the OP, I’d say the same thing.

Change the names but keep the facts: you and Emma go to a remote place on Earth, the only survivors of an airplane accident. You and Emma go on an adventure and save land and your own. Afterwards, the leader of the land, who calls himself “the Prophet,” says that Emma has been abused and should stay there. He’s lined up an adoptive mother, no need for you to check it out, his people have made sure that everything is well. According to the laws of his God, which as Prophet he’s completely entitled to announce and enforce, if she stays she can never leave and you can never check on her. There’s a reason why in this world people calling themselves “Prophet” who say that God’s laws prevent you from checking on the welfare of children are found on compounds.

Emma’s wishes are the only reason that the possibility is being considered, but Emma is a ten year old girl who has suffered extreme abuse and is now presented the opportunity to live in Candyland with the elves and fairies forever, so long as she never leaves and nobody ever checks to see if she’s still being abused. I need more assurances than that. In our world, Oakminister, the court and other attorneys would perform a thorough investigation and background check, and monitor the placement for months or years. It’s far, far from a perfect system but it beats abandoning kids in unknown situations forever.

The “Prophet” is apparently asking for my blessing, and absent safeguards of Emma’s safety she isn’t getting it. If she didn’t want my opinion she shouldn’t have asked.

Oh, I save your world, and when you ask my opinion you consider not sending me home or dismissing my opinion because I hurt your feelings? Harden the fuck up, Galadriel.

IAAL.

The problem with this premise is that there’s not much information about the (ultimately successful) adventure in which Emma and I played important (if not key) roles. Forgive me Skald if I’m off-base, but I’m going to read into this story a couple background assumptions.

I) To keep Pangea operating correctly (or make things right again) Pallas needed to reach over and grab a couple humans to play specific roles in the team (or maybe the whole team is just Emma and me) that is key to the adventure.

A) My assumption is that humans were needed for something related to their technological expertise[1] and/or physical attributes[2] and/or special knowledge or mentality[3].
1] The OP states Pangea’s tech is better than Earth’s, but maybe the task is like fixing a malfunctioning DOS 5.1 computer or trebuchet – something their tech has surpassed but the malfunctioning of an old unit threatens to destabilize…whatever.
2] Perhaps Pangea’s typical humanoids have only three fingers and a thumb on each hand and whatever’s broken requires 10 digits to manipulate. Or humans see/smell/hear/feel in a different spectrum and can detect something the Pangeans can’t sense.
3] Maybe the fact that I’m a martial-artist AND I’ve watched a ton of Jackie Chan movies gives me a knack for turning just about anything into a deadly weapon so that, when we’re imprisoned, I’m a lot more capable than our weapon-or-magic dependent captors expected. So after taking away our wands and crossbows and tying us to chairs beneath their doomsday device and explaining how it will work, they figured we’d just be helpless without those weapons…

B) My assumption is that the abuse Emma suffered isn’t just incidental to the story but a key plot point – she’s kinda like Tommy the Pinball Wizard, and whatever she’s done to cope with the abuse is what makes her The Perfect Choice for the role she needs to play on the protagonist team. For instance, unlike normal beings, Emma learned at an early age to endure atrocities directed against her and disassociate herself from the abuse. This enabled her to maintain her innocence, sanity, etcetera which were required in order to be able to qualify for some magical or divine test.

So, Emma and I call them quirks, the readers see them as strengths, and the author calls them plot premises. Literature analysts, if they bother to examine this tale, will call them romantic devices – the special attributes that gives the protagonist(s) the advantage that gets the job done.
II) As the tale unfolds, key characters must grow and change. It’s called character development and sometimes it’s even about building character. :slight_smile:
Maybe Emma will learn to stop fearing/hating/distrusting men/adults like me (and maybe that’s my only role in the tale). Maybe I learn to stop fearing/hating/distrusting kids like Emma (doubtful, but this is a work of fiction, after all). Maybe I learn to believe in unicorns and regain my lost innocence; maybe something helps Emma regain hers. Maybe Emma comes to realize she’s important as more than just a punching bag (and worse) and doesn’t need to be anyone’s victim any more. I think this is a more critical point for this thread than the assumptions in Part I: How have Emma and I grown?

Understanding how Emma has grown (if at all) determines my advice to the Prophet. If Emma has grown in ways that will help her cope with the situation(s) she left behind, then I’ll recommend she be sent back to do so. These types of stories tend to have an epilogue that involves the troubled protagonist taking the developments of her character and applying them to the difficulties she knew before she learned Pangea existed. We readers tend to assume the developed character will successfully apply the new growth to the issues left behind, even if that chapter remains unavailable for us to read. If Emma’s growth and new worldview would cause her long-term problems back on Earth, I would recommend she stay on Pangea – whether or not she associates in any way with Aredhel – so long as there are locals who are willing to help Emma get integrated into Pangean society/culture. After all, it may be that the character growth she has experienced occurred to help her cope with life on Pangea rather than with the issues she left behind. [Maybe her destiny is to eventually become a Prophet, or Pangea’s next itinerant hero like Xena or Conan.]

The Aredhel situation is a separate issue entirely. A key question is whether Pangea’s (or at least Aredhel’s culture’s) belief system and/or understanding of reality includes reincarnation. Since Emma and I didn’t go insane upon finding ourselves in another universe, I’m betting we’re mentally flexible enough to believe in reincarnation if it’s commonplace on Pangea. Delayed Cross-Universe Reincarnation isn’t much more of a mental leap. If DCUR is considered demonic or impossible or miraculously rare, then Aredhel should be directed to whatever passes for mental health treatment (bereavement therapy) on Pangea, rather than let Aredhel assume Emma is a replacement daughter brought by Pallas in answer to Aredhel’s worshipful prayers. [If Pallas wants to step forward and say, “Yeah, I did that (for whatever reason)” then the premise against worship of the gods is broken at that point.]
I realize I haven’t been offered the chance to stay. I do appreciate the repair of my little quirks (and hope the readers saw them as entertaining foils as the story unfolded). Nevertheless, I’ll offer my services as a cultural advisor. At the very least, I’d recommend some kind of inter-universe voice-mail receiving/transmitting device be given to me (or implanted) so I can answer any questions that arise in relation to Emma’s long-term acculturation on Pangea or reacculturation on Earth. [“Yeah, human teenagers tend to do that. Give me a couple days and I’ll get you some literature about electric guitars…”]
Then there’s Emma’s mother and other abusers. Unless my character development (see II above) included a realization that even bullies have their positive roles in the universe(s) and therefore shouldn’t be annihilated on sight (doubtful, but this is a work of fiction, after all) then I would like to make a special request that Pallas, who is able to do some amazing things in many universes, either
A) Give me the knowledge of where those people are and the ability to conceal just a few nonspectacular homicides – a few potions of invisibility should do it, as long as I know where their favorite restaurants are…:dubious:
or
B) Pluck those abusers from Earth and deposit them…well, somewhere horrific and/or inhospitable so they can spend their remaining years suffering each day at least twice as much as they made Emma suffer. Perhaps send them to a Pangean equivalent of Mercury or that kind of thing.

—G!

Emma should be sent back, pronto. My petition to that effect is already on file and there will be a follow-up from my counsel. If necessary, we can pursue an injunction against any sealing the portal until we can fix a venue with a sympathetic kappa judge-- I mean, until the case can be decided on its merits, which will doubtless take time. A hasty decision will be to no one’s benefit.

Also, no sense letting the brat stick around to foil us a second ti-- I mean, how about that apple dumpling?

This is a good argument as long as we’re on Earth, but when we’re talking about a magical fantasy land in which truth can be detected with a spell… well, I’d be inclined to trust that the motives being expressed are genuine.

Also, the elf-maid Aredhel who wants to adopt is not just some random adoptive mother. In this scenario, she’s a character that I’ve been on a quest with. This doesn’t mean I know her every motivation, but you’d have to know someone pretty well by the end of a fantasy quest. I’d certainly have seen Emma and Aredhel interact together and that would tell me a lot about whether the adoption would be a good one.

For that matter, I’ve also been on the quest with the Prophet. So I also feel like I’d have a pretty good appreciation of her personality as well.

As for the real world: we’d all like to see justice done and Emma sent to live happily ever after here. But seriously… how often is justice done right? What are the odds that she winds up in a loving family with someone who can attest under a truth spell that they have no ill will?

Rereading this this evening it seems that I may be coming off as unnecessarily sarcastic to the hypo and Skald out of spite or contempt, but I don’t mean to be at all. I’m being sarcastic in an attempt to be amusing to myself and the gentle reader, and I confess that “harden the fuck up, Galadriel” cracked me up a little every time I thought of it today. Anyway, more later.

ISTM that my new pals in Pangaea (did I spell that right?) can whip up some mighty fine artifacts. I’d like to have them put a convincing-to-a-court simulacrum of Emma’s abused corpse into her bedroom, and send Emma herself home with me.

I could probably also use a plausible cover story, and some documentation to ease her transition into my community and household.

P. S. Major kudos to the Prophet’s mother. Viviparous placental reproduction of an organism with functioning wings can’t be a lot of fun.