"Orcs?"

"He genetically modified my species into one of his own. There are billions of them and they're loyal to him. I don't have any ideas for what to do about them if we do manage to find his summoner - one possibility that has occurred to me is to summon him ourselves, bound."

"I like that way better than my first thought."

"Genocide? Yeah."

"Biologically killing them and storing their chips in Hell, yeah, I really don't like the idea, but."

"Could build a lightleaper and make them a planet really far away in Hell, where demons wouldn't stumble across them. We - could develop bioweapons for the purpose. If we can't think of a better way."

She sighs. "It's a possibility. I still don't like it, but I am familiar with the concept of a lesser of two evils."

"Never doing anything evil sometimes means passively permitting an awful lot of it," he agrees. "I will ask our biologists."

"All that is necessary for evil to flourish is that good men do nothing," she quotes. "...You said chips could be put in at the ages of three and above."

"Yeah. We can try for a bioweapon that somehow spares small children but I really can't make any promises there."

"Summoning circles for Melkor, bound as tightly as tightly as humanly possible--I, I can make, as many of them as--have someone start categorically filling them in as soon as it's theoretically possible we got the summoner--"

"I can have a couple hundred thousand people on circle-filling. He's got billions, though."

"So it only works if he doesn't know he needs to--but--"

Her soul is shrieking in horror at the idea of deploying biological weapons against two-year-olds. That's. That's just. No is not a strong enough word, there isn't a strong enough word--

"We haven't had very long to think about the problem given demon help. Maybe someone will come up with something better. Maybe we can just put them all in a coma."

"Yeah." Okay yes she can calm down now there are other options. But--still, the very idea makes her want to flinch. "What's he actually doing on Endore?"

"We do not actually have faster-than-light communications. I suppose it's possible he's going around handing out teddy bears."

She sort of feels like it might be appropriate to apologize for freaking out but she is not the slightest bit sorry, actually, wiping out every baby in a species is the most freak-out-able concept she's heard, ever.

"So how do you know he's seriously worse than the other Valar, besides that he killed your grandfather?"

"Well, what he did last time he was on Endore was capture and torture hundreds of thousands of Elves for medical experiments, and wipe out civilizations for entertainment, so I'm not leaning very hard on the 'teddy bears' guess."

"Okay, that definitely sounds bad." But hundreds of thousands versus--what fraction of orcs were babies...and--babies--think of something more productive. "Not that I expected it not to."

"We can land a stealth shuttle, get a feel for what's going on."

"Mhm."

"Or I can send you home. I do realize, even if we've had longer to think about it."

"Not being a part of it doesn't make it better. If I'm here I can--

I'm not the kind of person who runs away from something like this."

"Yeah. We have three days during which we can't do anything but think of options, and then if we decide to head to Endore five more days to get there, and then we'll decide what risks are worth taking..."

"Mhm."