"Well. I can work on that."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." He makes a portal back to a different, also-pretty unoccupied park.

She steps through.

"If it's not their not wanting to be there what is it, exactly? Maiar can operate physical bodies but have to do everything manually and could just not do some things..."

He follows, closing the portal behind them and exchanging his wings for a shirt so as to be less recognizable. Feathers turn to smoke, then recoalesce as fabric.

"...I think... what I get out of it has to do with making people afraid, and I'd like it just as well, maybe even better, if I was making them happy instead. Godlike beings pretending to have bodies but not pretending hard enough to get hurt would be the wrong sort of thing on a lot of levels."

"Hm. Elves are prudes so I have no idea how common this sort of thing might be in the population, and I don't know about orcs or Dwarves because it didn't come up when I visited them."

"I can imagine it wouldn't, it's kind of a niche interest to say the least."

"And not the sort of thing you trot out for Elf tourists on their honeymoon."

Giggle.

"It would be so awkward! We're notorious monogamists!"

"If only you'd known this information would be useful someday, you could've said something! I suppose that would've been nearly as awkward."

"I could have checked a library."

"Would it be in libraries?"

"Maybe!"

"I doubt you'd find anything in a library around here, but you're welcome to look."

"I do wonder if people who might be inclined actually know that you'd take volunteers."

"They might not, I suppose, though it seems obvious enough to me. ...there's also the question of - maybe there's someone out there who would like it, but wants to be able to quit if they change their mind, and they really don't have any good reasons to trust me and I'm not sure how to give them one."

"Do you ever let people go?"

"No, and they wouldn't be in a very reassuring condition if I did."

"Then I can see how someone might be under the impression that's not an option. Elves and orcs can swear to things, but you don't have that..."

"I do not," he agrees.

"Elves can also be forked from pre-torture instances, which was necessary for a lot of people after Melkor was defeated, but humans don't have that either unless your resurrection power happens to work that way."

"I could probably figure it out but it doesn't come naturally. And I still don't want people to know I can bring back the dead. What are you imagining I'd do with this ability—?"

"Oh, it's not the same, really, I didn't have something in mind for it. Melkor rendered a lot of Elves as pure bodiless information which he could duplicate and torture more conveniently in parallel at high speed. The results did not want to exist, so after the war their pre-capture instances were instantiated once per, instead. My husband's one of those."

"What a bizarre thing to do."