Oh, I couldn't tell she was enjoying herself but I'm glad she did.

The Maiar are dreadful at emotional cues. I'd have expected Melian to have learned but - they're also slow learners.

Well, I will retroactively imagine her smiling.

Smiling and giggling delightedly, the Maiar revel in Creation and its boundless capabilities. 

Giggling it is.

I know it's a bit hard to imagine. 

Little bit.

She's done a good job here. First Maia I've met who left me impressed with what she did with what she had.

What do the others do?

Wander around putting sticks in their mouths, a lot of them - they find senses really interesting and confusing - or protect one specific river at all costs and against all reason, or live in a tree and offer passersby prophecies about their life. 

...the prophecies sound potentially useful.

They are useless by design! If you'll change something about your fate you are not permitted to know it. So you get only information that definitionally won't affect the course of events.

Then what's the point?

I asked a prophecy-Maia that once and he looked at me very sadly and said I should take it up.

I guess that was a prophecy, which I did not listen to.

Take it up?

Sitting in a tree prophecying in full knowledge it wouldn't affect the world. I think the implication was supposed to be that was a better life than whatever one I had destined for me. But I might just disagree with that Maia about the nature of a good life.

Could you in fact take up prophecy? Is it an acquired skill or something?

You get knowledge you won't use. So if you're sincerely committed to sitting in a tree being useless, you'll get lots of knowledge, though nothing that'd move you to stop being useless.

I think I like blessing divination better.

Laughter. Me too.

Pity it doesn't work for you.

I expect it'd be gloomy on me. Our can't-do-a-thing-about-it kind is.

Blessings can only get so gloomy. They're blessings. This does make them less informative, though.

How would blessings convey pessimism?

I would have been pessimistic if I'd drawn 'endurance' when I was drawing for the question of whether my powers work on the enemy. It's contextual. Sometimes you don't want 'surprise', or 'courage', or 'resilience', or 'fertility'.