Talking to snakes revisited

I'm quite lucky, in a way, because although I'm alive right now, I'm also dead some of the time so I can go between both places without too much fuss. OK, so I have to keep Aphrodite sweet, make sure she doesn't think I'm visiting Perspehone down here, or one of the other "ladies" she keeps getting told I see, but that's not too difficult, well, not compared with getting permission to visit upstairs (in triplicate) from what you might call the dead hand of bureaucracy - and believe me, they are both dead and bureaucratic.
So I'm on my way back up again, having asked Eurydice where she was when the snake turned up out of the blue. I reckon he's gone back there, after all, they don't have a lot of imagination, snakes, and he has got to find someone to do his biting for him ( unless they gave him his sacs back when they sent him back up - the records don't say so, but you never know) or he'll starve. Ask her for a description of him, a bit more detailed than "he looked a bit of a snake in the grass at the time" and she does manage a bit more- apparently when he lost his sacs both his eyes went a bit milky - he can see fine, they just look a bit unusual.

So it takes me a few days to find the house where Eurydice lived - where it all happened - he isn't around, so at least that's consistent with what I'd been told, so all I've got to do now is keep out of Penny's way as best I can. She's still there, still waiting for her other half to come home - maybe she needs to realise there might be a reason he doesn't want to be there, and a mirror might give her a clue why that is, and she's still trying it on a bit with blokes, there's quite a few of them hanging around - but I manage to put her off. So off I head into the hills to look for snakes. Can't help feeling that I'm being followed, or at least watched - maybe it's just paranoia, but the trees seem to be talking to each other, and I can't quite catch what they're saying, and when I turn around, sometimes there's a shadow with no light to cast it, and there's a bit of a breeze blowing in the branches that didn't seem to be there when I was outside the wood...it's all a bit creepy....anyway eventually I get out of the woods and back into the sun, and then, just as I'm coming round the corner of a big rock, I see them - two snakes, vipers by the look of it, fast asleep in the sun. They're still soem way off, but I can see that one of them's got milky-white eyes...it must be him. So now I have to come to a decision - how do I play this - first off, how do I avoid getting bitten - there's two of them, and even though I've got a stick with a fork in the end ( no, not that sort of fork !!) that's only going to work for one of them. I may be able to travel between the two lands pretty easily, but right now I'm alive and a snakebite could kill me, which I certainly don't want to happen. It would be really difficult to explain down there, for a start, can't imagine Mr H believeing any story I came up with and I don't need to make him suspicious.
Don't think that they put back the sacs on our friend, as I said, didn't say so in the records, but you never can be sure...how big a risk is it ?
Then, assuming I'm still alive and unbitten, how do I find out what I want to know ? Do I do it straight away and ask, or try to fool him into a confession of some sort....Decide the latter is likely to work better, at least as a starting point...so, pluck up the courage and walk towards them - that wakes them both up and one of them goes for me straight away - the other one kind of hangs back a bit. Fortunately, I can put the forked bit of the stick down on the head of the one that's having a go, and hold himdown, and the other one, the one with the milky eyes, just watches me, a bit warily. Obvioulsy not had the sacs put back in, or if he has, he doesn't know...
So I say to them that I'm not after hurting them or anything, just want to talk, and if they promise not to bite me I'll let his mate go, as long as they don't make a run for it - so they agree to that, and I do it. Now I have to work out what it is I want to ask them.
And that's it for now.....