"What're you picking up on?"

"Ah, ambition, the emotional appeal to you of being able to look at problems and go 'listen up I'm powerful enough to make this stop existing if the rest of you just follow your incentives' and a lot of tendencies that tend to make acquiring that power feasible - beyond ambition, I mean - goal-driven, self-aware..."

"The self-aware thing is a point of pride."

"Loki coped very well with a lot of psychological pressure. I was impressed with her."

"I may not have quite that much resilience against psychological pressure? I don't think growing up in Materia was really good for me."

"The Enemy tried to distract her by torturing her friends and then forcing her to kill them. She was not distracted at all, as far as I could tell."

"...good for her."

"Give yourself a thousand years."

"I'm not sure I'm so much going for 'battle-hardened' as a direction of personal growth."

"I wouldn't call her that, just - hard to manipulate. Impossible to toy with."

"That I do like."

"You'll like her."

"I bet. ...Who's your mother, anybody I might have met in my Arda?"

"Did Father not say? Nerdanel, she's Mahtan's daughter..."

"Oh I met her, awwwwww!"

"They were very good for and to eachother for a long time. The Enemy managed to change that."

"...I have dabbled in family counseling but have no idea if they want me to go anywhere near that."

"She had persistent prophetic dreams that he'd burn my little brother to death. He refused to believe they were prophetic."

"...oh dear."

"Hard on even the happiest of marriages, that. I think they'll work it out eventually. Love survives quite a lot. I've been pleasantly surprised by it."

"Your brother's back like everybody else, right?"

"Yes. They're off conquering some polity, I think - don't worry, it was a really evil polity -"

"...I'll take your word for that."

"You'll have to, your counterpart ended oaths. After Angband I'm charitable towards ventures to end slavery, and my brothers are good at doing it bloodlessly."

"Ended oaths. What, all of them?"