"There is something to be said for 'no torturing anything that has preferences about this and wants you to stop'. I wish I had a better sense of what he considers fun so I could guess what would count as ruining it."

"I am a little worried about how he's meant to gauge whether something has preferences or not."

"Fair, Anything that he thinks there's even a reasonable chance you'd consider a person on having had the chance to interact with a lot of them?"

"And no fiddling with his assessment of my consideration and some clause about any genuinely unique entities he runs across and a definition of 'reasonable'..."

"Might be safe. He'd probably try to alter your opinions about what counts as a person, but I can't think how he'd do that, or you could add a clause prohibiting it."

"Eugh, yes, no opinion-alteration."

"Might do the same thing for 'hurting'?"

"Yeah. With the New Geneva Declaration as an attachment for benchmark. - That being a human treaty on what constitutes adequate treatment of people in and out of situations of imprisonment. It will not include 'must never lock up an Elf without lots of houseplants and even then keep it to a week or less' but it should lose him plausible deniability on things like sleep deprivation or whatever."

"We kind of might be in violation of a human treaty on adequate treatment of our people - the rate people are working on better blessings and better evacuation ships -"

"Well, you didn't sign it. I think you guys need more houseplants and less sleep and, like, that works fine for you, I wouldn't be attaching New Geneva as anything other than a hint."

"That's insightful of you. I've been thinking, reading human media, that 'we'll wait to build exquisitely beautiful things until after the war' works as well for an Elven mind as 'we'll sleep after the war' to a mortal one."

"Humans can be strongly affected by unpretty surroundings but it takes really awful concrete buildings and other stressors and even then it's just a few who are anything more than slightly moody about it."

"We're lucky to have you, you make tolerably pretty things by default. But yes, I think in a human city we'd do about as badly as in a human prison."

"Well," says Cam, "don't go get arrested by humans, then, they'll think you're making it up if you tell them."

"Interdimensional travel might be impossible in principle, but I'll take a look at it one everything more pressing is sorted. If it turns out to be possible we'll be sure to do lots of communicating before we say hello to any humans. And they'll already know of our existence because of lightleapers  - do they already?"

"Hasn't been a concordance so there's been no chance to go through fairies and no demons with the information have had a chance to tell yet."

"Ah, well. At least it's not as if people in your world are dying of the lack."

Nod.

"Is it worth prohibiting the Enemy from interdimensional travel? It seems like that any restrictions we put in place for this world could prove inadequate in one with sufficiently different physics or something, but it may be impossible anyway and it may be something else they'd find too prohibitive..."

"It's... probably worth it. It seems unlikely there are exactly six universes, five of them clustered, and that there is exactly one interdimensional travel mechanism which worked here only once for completely irreproducible reasons - and other universes are likely to contain situations we don't anticipate."

"Yep. You could make it 'can't travel to other dimensions without Cam's agreement' if we happen to find one that's somehow safer than ours - though of course make it apparent he couldn't blackmail you into it -"

"My uncoerced agreement," nods Cam.

"Do we want provisions for your permission to alter other conditions? Could we give him permission to kill something else even worse than him if it somehow shows up?"

"...might come in handy. Be odd for there also to be an extremely finite number of unfortunate deities," Cam says. "Could help with the not-ruining-his-fun thing too."

"If he thinks he can eventually bring you around on being evil," Feanaro says, nodding, "or get to work incredible violence even if only against designated targets."