"What was that like?"

"Uh, took probably a billion years to get familiar enough with moving things around to get anything bigger than an atom on purpose. It wasn't boring, but it would be for a mind like yours."

"...huh."

"Most of us don't have bio forms because they're really fucking difficult, done our way."

"Sounds it. If you're that immaterial how are any of the ones in the black hole stuck there?"

"...gravitational time dilation. Were you just, like, really winging it on the whole 'feed a planet into a black hole' thing. They could leave as soon as they noticed, it'll be a couple hundred billion years before they do."

"Oh."

"It's not like they're trapped in there suffering or anything, or Melian'd be going even crazier."

"I was mostly modeling them as 'dead', honestly."

"It's basically the same thing for any purpose I can think of."

"Not necessarily for purposes of extracting them with magic."

She snorts. "Good luck with that."

"To what extent can you have location as nonmaterial beings?"

"There's a volume of space in which we can decide how the atoms are configured. That's usually what we mean when we say where we are."

"...huh. When you're not piloting a material form how do you move around?"

"You decide to control an adjacent volume of space. We have an acceleration of around a thousand meters a second, can't break lightspeed. If we're on a lightleaper we'll travel with it. We do have faster than light communication among each other."

"How does that work?"

"If I want to know how someone else is doing, I can know instantly whether they want me to and, if they do, everything they're experiencing at the moment. No matter where they are. Most of us leave those channels active with a lot of other people, feels like being able to be in more places than one, and so it was like ninety-nine percent of our senses dying, when everyone in Valinor stopped having experiences."

"...ah."

"We can also share thoughts? We do that less often, you share them thoroughly, it's like you've stopped being a separate person. I've heard people wonder if the Valar are just a lot of us who intermingled and didn't separate."

"...is that plausible?"

"Dunno. You'd get maybe one, two, Vala-like things if you assume we were distributed according to a power law to start with, but I don't know why you'd assume that."

"Huh." Notes notes. "Any comment on Eru?"

"Something made us. We all vaguely remember it, even. But -" she shrugs. "Vaguely. Being in the presence of something. Seeing a glimpse of the script. Thirteen billion years ago."

"Did you all come into existence at once?"