Keziah opens her mouth; Angela coughs and she just sighs and waves Céleste over to Celegorm, whom they degook.

And who says the same thing. "If you don't like it we can sit down and try to sort how we can stop the Enemy," he says.

"...I wanna just go home if you're gonna keep being gooked."

"Thank you for your help, treasure. You too, Céleste."

And the teenagers vanish.

"Apologies for activating their magic sense unpleasantly. I do appreciate their help."

"They found their power pretty recently and are still learning to be well-behaved with it. So. Your actual priority is an evil god?"

"Indeed. He has a fortress a few hundred miles north of here and could be at minimum put out of commission for a while if that fortress ceased to exist, though actually killing him is going to take some doing. I swear that everything I am saying to you is true as far as I know and that I haven't deliberately skewed my knowledge and have good reason to think it's accurate. He has about a million orcs under his command and in constant physical and psychological torment. They're all sworn to him. He has some minor deities in his service, many of whom can shapechange. The other gods in our world cannot kill him but could keep him indefinitely imprisoned; they released him."

"I have a perfectly good lie-detection power, you do not have to swear things. ...Lazarus, your ingotry works through pastwatching, yes? Can you give us an idea of the size of this thing?"

"Of the evil god? Um," he says.

A quiet moment of squinting at nothing in particular.

Then: "That is more sizes than I was expecting one entity to have! There is a human-sized body and a city-sized fortress and an amount of surrounding landscape. Everything is very horrible there and I am very upset about it. But in terms of magical size... not intractably big? I would not, for example, be worried about unintended consequences to the universe if you wished him out of existence. Although it would not be any good for his body or his fortress or his surrounding landscape."

"Those should probably stop existing anyway."

"Not Downsideable so anything we delete from existence we can't just get back later. The orcs and minor deities should likely not be in the way if the place will blow in his absence. How does being sworn to him affect them if he ceases to exist?"

"They stop being sworn to him. Maiar are nearly impossible to kill and an exploding fortress shouldn't do it, and the orcs will go to Mandos which is not good but probably retrievable."

"Mandos?"

(Glass disappears, apparently feeling she is no longer needed in particular.)

"Our afterlife. We can in principle be reembodied from there but the god of the dead won't reembody orcs."

"These all about the same caliber of god?"

"They are. Eru'll definitely object if you kill them, though."

"That being a higher caliber of god? But will Eru object if I remove dead people from their custody?"

"...possible, but less likely. Eru didn't think the Valar did a particularly superlative job reembodying the dead."

"...then why didn't he fix it?"

"I have no idea. Nothing he does makes much sense to me. This is how he wanted history to go and I don't know why."

"This is complicated enough that we are probably going to want to permanently assign your world to a Bell rather than doing the whoever-saw-it-first-spot-fixes thing; and whether that Bell should be me or one of my alts is an open question. There's a variety and the most substantial factors are probably how busy each of us are at home and cultural similarity, did either of you notice any substantial culture gaps with Pen?"

"We disagreed on whether giving people the option of permanent information-lost gone-forever death was really important, she objected to us ordering someone to open doors indefinitely until we got Milliways, otherwise I think we agreed. She's a nuanced thinker, for an eight-year-old."

"Pen's very bright. Opening doors a lot pretty much only works for the kind of person who has a fixed chance per door-opening as opposed to per day or something, it wouldn't have helped if you didn't have one of those on hand. We are not in the habit of total information loss in part because one of our greatest tools is Downside and it's both administratively and structurally opposed to the concept, but your world can't be Downsided at least right now anyway."

"People who want to really-irrecovably-die, around here, it's mostly because they have decided that the risk of someone someday torturing them isn't worth all of existence up to that point, and I don't think you could convince them to be certain enough, not with lots of universes with varying capabilities. But I don't think I'll clash with someone who's working with the constraints of their own finicky universe."

"Anyway, I'm probably as reasonable a primary Bell contact for Arda as anyone. While you're in here with the door closed and there isn't a Janegem in your world its time will be paused; you can take as long as seems most prudent to explain everything I may need to know to start slinging godkilling magic around or ask any questions you have."