"Hm. Why did he want to kill you?"

"He wasn't super eloquent about it but I got the impression he disapproved of my hobbies."

"That did seem likeliest but it could have been something else."

"Which, well, fair enough, but when killing me didn't work because I am immortal he decided the thing to do was try harder, and he ended up wiping out most of a city before I got him."

"Oh dear."

"Gave me a new appreciation for people who manage to complain about my lifestyle without killing a hundred thousand people!"

"When the Valar warred with Melkor to stop him from running server farms full of tortured uploads there was a lot of collateral damage but it was in the long run fixable."

"Well. Resurrection exists. But I liked that city."

"Did you resurrect the residents?"

"...you would've heard about it if I had, it'd take me centuries even if I did nothing else the whole time and there'd be no way I could possibly pass it off as 'oh I guess he didn't quite manage to kill you'."

"Are you planning on setting aside time for it eventually?"

"No."

"It's actually not possible for me to resurrect everyone who dies. At the end of every year of trying I'd have a bigger job ahead of me than I did at the beginning, evem if I never slept and did two a day, which is not a pace I could keep up any longer than a month. So something has to change before people start getting resurrected at scale. Maybe I figure out how to do a hundred thousand people in a day, or maybe someone else survives the self-dedication for Life and Death and goes around encouraging more people to try it and bringing them back when they fail until there are enough of them to keep up. Who knows. But I don't plan on setting aside time for it someday because the only way it's possible is if it stops being a thing I'd need to set aside that much time for."

"I understand. I'm trying to think how likely the Valar are to be able to help."

"That I couldn't tell you. It'd help some if people didn't die of old age, but I still don't think the whole world could reliably keep it down to less than one a week forever, and that's about as much as I could possibly keep up with in the long term."

"Dwarves don't die of old age and the Valar don't know how to bring them back yet when they die of accident, but they're working on it."

"Working on it how?"

"Some wheedling Eru, some contemplating whether various things they can currently do are safe to try."

Snort.

"What would 'unsafe to try' look like, in a resurrection method?"

"Undesirable results for the resurrected party, misallocation of their power such that Melkor could escape while they weren't looking, that kind of thing."

"...that's a concern? Kinda sounds like a disaster waiting to happen."

"Not a substantial concern, but they tend very cautious."

"Still. ...if he springs loose somehow and you need help dealing with him, I'm game."

"Thank you but I really hope that is not the climax of this plot as it were."