"He put a thousand years of work into it. I'd be impressed if I wasn't so annoyed. My father has two half-brothers, who he dislikes, and Moringotho planted a lot of evidence that my father was getting unstable and paranoid and was planning to get them and their families exiled from Valinor, possibly as the first stage in a violent coup that ended up ousting the Valar. And then he planted a lot more evidence that my uncles were planning a coup to get my family exiled. And then he fanned the flames on the internet, and I woke up one day to find most of Tirion carrying guns in the streets. I don't know if you can summon the kind. They were modified welding tools. They were very deadly. Everyone insisted they had them for sport."

"Welding tools. I could probably summon them but I don't believe I shall."

"No one died. Findekano and I didn't sleep for three years, trying to talk everyone back down, but no one died and even when the King was assassinated leaving succession an open question we managed not to settle it with violence. But I wasn't paying Endore much attention."

Nod. "Congratulations on the no one dying."

Nods. "I traded all my interpersonal relationships for a united Noldorin command and I haven't wondered even for a second if it was worth it. But I do constantly think that if I'd been better I wouldn't have needed to."

"Yeah, I have a thing like that. If I'd been a little more charming with the daeva would they have told me about ex-human daeva in time for me to get my parents to summon things. If I'd rolled out the revelation a little differently would demons have such a bad reputation. If I'd done it better somehow would I have maybe not been murdered. Totally worth it. But."

"It's - unpleasant, to have spent so much time being better than everyone else and then run headfirst at something where that's not where the universe has set the bar and your best isn't actually good enough." 

Nod.

"If a black hole might not kill him what the Halls will."

"Antimatter?"

"Oh, good, so we'll be useful for something."

"You're very useful," Cam assures him, "I might otherwise have decided for some reason to spring a shampoo commercial on an unsuspecting audience and then where would I be."

"If you'd done it in Valimar and were sufficiently tolerant of local law enforcement, you'd be in a treehouse awaiting sentencing for obscenity!"

"Really? Oh dear. Why a treehouse? What's the range of sentences on obscenity?"

"Treehouse because the Eldar handle imprisonment dreadfully. The Enemy must have some mechanism to keep people alive because ordinarily lock us up for a week and we start losing our grip on our bodies and do it for a month and we're dead. So if you get angry enough with someone to imprison them, make it an exceptionally pretty large prison cell with lots of plants and don't do it for very long. We can voluntarily do small constrained spaces a little better than that but still, they tend to be very hard on us. 

Sentence is usually to apologize and explain yourself but if you don't feel like doing that they'll treehouse you for up to a week."

"...wow," says Cam.

"Which part?"

"They're going to be appalled by human prison-related media."

"I think they're appalled by literally everything they've successfully translated."

"Ummmmm..." He looks through the reviews. "...they like animal alphabet books."

Maitimo laughs delightedly. "Ah, Valinor, I miss you. Not very much - me they'd treehouse until I agreed to get fixed, if they knew - but a little."

"They're... much better at being non-tacky with stupid quantities of gemstones and gold and stuff than demons are? Demons are very tacky."

"We have a very refined aesthetic sense. But if you're reaching for reasonably nice things to say about my homeland, you don't have to go for that - every Elf I've ever know would unhesitatingly go hungry for another person, or die for them if there was even the slightest chance it'd help. The people who aren't here aren't here because they disagreed we could make a difference. They try very hard to do right, as they understand it, and they fail to understand it right because there are literal deities around confusing it."

Nod, nod.

"Should we head out?"