"Shame how their god is evil. Okay, then there's probably not a one-size-fits-all approach. I'm also tempted to find out if any of their liturgies claim Melkor is good and whether we could argue that since Melkor is good and the guy up north is obviously not good, he's obviously not Melkor."

"This particular family is at least not brainwashed enough to be incapable of holding policy opinions, so that's potentially promising."

"Perhaps I'll set Moryo on the local theology, figure out the best approach. Anyway don't make an announcement to the whole orc nation just yet, it might have unintended effects. I'm actually kind of reassured that he convinced them we started it, it suggests a deeper compatibility of values. Relatedly if I'm reading this rightly the united orc President's a Maia, not an orc."

"Oh? Do they know that?"

"Yes. The Maiar can't have kids, and kids are rather central to orc culture - the birthrate's nine - so it wasn't a secret. He's quite good at the job as measured by industrial output, quite bad as measured by percentage of the populace casually executed."

"My family of seven's below average? Well, so far, I don't know how many kids they want... Speaking of values differences it's promising that they don't tell the general population they're executing people en masse."

"Yes, it is. That's my other fear about going public with the truth in whatever form they can be persuaded to believe it - they're still sworn to obey Melkor, I'm not sure he's much worse off if he has a billion unwilling oath-forced servants and trying to resist an oath to serve someone causes intense psychological torment."

"Maybe he figures they'll be less effective under intense psychological torment."

"I assume that he does. But - making the Enemy less effective by forcing him to use the plan in which a billion people are in intense psychological torment doesn't much appeal."

"No, no it does not. - If it's 'words of Melkor's enemies' are we in the clear with, say, silent film?"

"If they think it's words, yes. Words isn't the best translation - could try it on a few captives first -"

"Next time I am making sure I don't get a car with five kids in it, I fucked up on that," sighs Cam.

"You will have a hard time finding adult orcs that don't have children, or women of childbearing age who aren't pregnant. Even in wartime." He shudders. "That's a significant values difference."

"Maybe I can find grandma orcs who are not actively babysitting any of their grandchildren right then."

"Good skill. I also still have that run of FTL communications experiments, next time you're far enough away to test them."

"That makes three things to test when I am far away," says Cam.

"Alright." He turns back to his screen. "You know how to reach me?"

"I'm gonna hand out phones, actually - not secure ones but still."

"Even better. I built prototypes for ones that could be accomplished with presumed local tech and resource levels, we were expecting we'd need to." 

"I was just gonna copy the Valinor kind if there's not a compelling reason to go with yours?"

"Less escalatory? Valinor's a much nicer network but if you're just doing phones there's no performance difference. I won't take offense, though. Send me something once it's working."

"Okay. Should we do one-time pads for secure me-to-you-guys communication?"

"How confident are you that your world's technology would be secure?"

"One time pads should be completely secure unless they get ahold of the pad. I think this was proven with math or something."

His eyes light up. "Oh! I think I know the principle. Yes, let's have one of those. We can manage to destroy a pad if this place is attacked. 

If this place is attacked, incidentally, there's a file titled 'uploads-minds' that has attempted workarounds of your minds limitation. I am not optimistic but if you come back to nothing it'd be worth running through them."