"Yeah. Turned him into a bird to get him off the cliff. Took him fucking decades to believe that was real."

"Mine still doesn't."

"Mine didn't until I picked up yet a different magic rock in the same family as the Tesseract and gave all the Elves and orcs free will. That plus the fact that he knew me fairly well and didn't think it was consistent that I could have free-will-dispensing power and still be working for the Enemy added up well enough."

"My magic's transmissible. I--think--he was genuinely happy for a moment, the first time he got it to work. But I have no idea how to fix the underlying problem except 'kill Morgoth and hope that the problem resolves itself at some point in the rest of forever.'"

"Has to be something unmistakable. As it happens 'holding your breath' is - for Elves - that, but you can't just tell him, obviously. So that leaves Eru-themed stuff. Mine briefly entertained the idea of marrying some random person before it occurred to him that it could just be another prisoner."

"And, obviously, me trying to convince him it's real is not evidence that it is."

"Yeah. It gets frustrating. He works around it amazingly well."

"He's fantastically competent or I wouldn't have let him give me orders, in the battle," she agrees.

"After all the everything on my Arda was wrapped up I hired him to help me end the ancestral war between my birth and adoptive planets."

"Fun."

"It is! The Noldor who weren't in Valinor at the time moved to a new planet and they're all really busy and it's great."

"Sucks about the war, though."

"I sort of gave Mandos a stern talking to and got most everybody out. But yes."

"I actually meant the one whose battle-lines you got adopted across," she clarifies.

"Oh, that one. Yes, it's terrible, we're fixing it, my mother's plan was stupid but mostly in the 'it required parenting skills to be reliably pulled off' sense, still left me with an interesting position."

"I'm planning to just steal from Mandos, personally, if he's negotiable with at all I don't see it happening before Morgoth dies and I suspect the theft will be easier for me to pull off than Godslaying."

"Oh, yeah, go for it. I didn't have a convenient way to provide any of the dead people bodies, so I wrung them out of him instead, but if you can do the bodies part, fuck 'im."

"Same magic that regrew Maedhros' hand, writ larger," she explains.

"Marvelous. Don't forget the orcs, if you can do anything about them. It's not their fault."

"I know. I--plan to, but it's not as simple a fix, I'm pretty sure it'll have to wait until at least Morgoth's dead."

"- you might be able to borrow Fëanor's trick for at least some of them - they swear when they're very young, barely able to talk, they don't know what they're saying, and intent matters, I started a - an orc cult, had them repeat the same words assigning the word 'Elf' to mean the ones in Valinor and calling everyone on their continent Quendi instead and 'Melkor' meaning a popularly worshipped probably nonexistent deity from my galaxy - once the Enemy found out he made all the orcs re-swear as adults, didn't work any more, and also orcs are most easily put in a re-swearing mood if you can fix their chronic pain problem, but you could get some of them that way - but - you do have to be careful, they took my favorite cult orc and -"

"I'm sorry."

Sigh. "She's okay now. Mandos coughed her up, she lives on a planetful of free orcs."

"And she believes it?"

"She wasn't released deluded, she was released under conflicting oaths with orders to get me to kill her."