"Exactly. I'm pretty sure I am not going to eventually be evil."

"It did cross my mind to worry that you're only a hundred something and this universe is 13 billion local years old and should last forever with demon magic and this leaves you rather unstoppable if a billion years turn out to change the mind in undesirable ways, or one of the evil entities that might exist in the multiverse has mind-control, or something. But I can't think of a way around that and as I said I expect to have killed him long before then."

"I feel very stable but the mind control or for that matter the reliability of my self-assessment are both points of concern. No need to express any of the reasons to believe the clause won't be used horrendously to the Enemy, though."

"Yep. If you wanted to be more cautious you could say your current self has to be the one who'd give permission, but that has costs in terms of his odds of agreeing."

"And I cannot just load 'Cam, age one hundred seventy-two' from backup and I don't like the idea of trusting his assessment of my judgment if he could become convinced I was unqualified to correct him."

"And no one back home you'd trust to have a position as important as 'without the permission of Cam-and-so-and-so?"

"My parents are very nice people but would not be suited to advising an evil deity and I have alas not made person-curation a project of mine."

"I think having a permission condition on 'kill people' but not 'harm people' might be the way to balance concerns about your future stability and run-ins with mind-alteration against the fear we'd need Moringotho against something."

"...Yeah, that sounds good." Note note.

"He can't order the orcs to do anything, but we also want to discourage him making it known what he'd like them to be doing, they think he's their savior and will think so even more after the destruction of Valinor..."

"That might be less of a pressing problem once all the ones he killed for not wanting to swear to him are alive again to tell the tale, but yeah."

"He can deny personally having any part in it, throw some lieutenants under the bus, but yes."

"Speaking of which I need to know how to cover the lieutenants, there might be important ones besides the one who came to the parley."

"Make them all swear to the same thing? It's not that restrictive for people whose motives aren't murderous."

"It is a little with the interdimensional travel restrictions and so on. I'm not going to be real quick to hand out permissions for that."

"Interdimensional travel isn't even currently possible. You could have a pared-down version for lieutenants if you don't think they need the whole thing to be safely permitted to live. Or, ah, those we can more easily kill after the war, I already have a notion of how to do it."

"Your anti-Maia thing you mentioned?"

"Yep. It's not that close to working and it's currently too broadly targeted but once the war's over there won't be the pressing time considerations."

"I might also need a definition of 'lieutenants', I don't know what kind of employment contracts or facsimiles thereof his Maiar are under."

"Every Maia who he's worked with or given orders and who he expects to continue carrying out any of his current projects? Too broad?"

"He might have some actually innocuous project in the works for whatever reason, or ones that could be converted into innocuousness, or a Valaish definition of 'current' applying to whatever he did with his time during parole..."

"Well, if you have the time, you could ask each of them to swear to a full account of all their activities for him that they expect would interest you, go from there. That works better if there's ten than a thousand."

"I have what may or may not be a useful instinct that it is unwise to go in expecting to definitely need to make a lot more judgment calls after delivering my offer. Seems likely to open me to attempts to deliberately fatigue me or something."

"Yes, fair enough. Do you have ideas for language broad enough to cover everyone in his service? We could also be very idealistic and say they all have to abide by the same conditions until they explain themselves completely and truthfully to a court set up for war crimes and abide by its judgment whatever it is."

"Then we have to figure out how to set up a court for war crimes."