Yep. He should wait until well after the song's over, since it's his deeds being celebrated, but then - yep.

Good.

Hugs.

Such hugs.

...he thinks he's still there but at least he's wrong.

I wonder how he thinks the Enemy can imitate Macalaure's composition.

Maybe he thinks he doesn't have the artistic discernment to identify the real thing or something, like he couldn't understand Fëanáro's work...

Yeah. Something for anyone else who has occasion to wonder if they're in Angband, though. I think about it a lot. I could tell Macalaure apart from almost anyone else. 

Maybe not a Maia, though.

Which is the necessary distinction.

Yeah. 

There's got to be something - not for Maitimo, but for everyone else now that we know in advance, something we can't fake -

What might he not be able to fake?

I don't know. Don't know enough about how he does it. My first guesses would have been osanwe, but he must have a way to fake that, and oaths, but he must just let them really speak those...

If he has a way to produce the impression that one has just heard a stirring piece of music without actually composing any we're kinda fucked.

Yeah, and to some degree he must have something like that, I doubt he animates a hundred thousand people for crowd scenes, so he can give the impression you're looking out on a crowd without generating the details, but -

- not sure if it's a good idea to ask Maitimo about any of this - 

Yeah, I don't know. Clinging.

Very, very much clinging. Feanáro also said eventually after the war he could look into doing something for memory. Retroactive perfect memory, to undo all the tampering at once, hopefully to pull a convincing hallucination Sauron has to erase and reset bits a lot, and so the earlier hallucinations would be immediately distinguishable from this by the amount of tweaking and resetting...

Might help. Except the Enemy could fake that just by restoring all his memories at once... maybe not the perfect part, that might be legitimately difficult.

And it'd still mean this scenario had involved no missteps and corrections, that Thauron was either now getting us all perfect on the first try or that it was really us -

It would matter how imperfect he got us before, just how many times he had to re-run interactions. If he was already pretty close...

Yeah.

I doubt he was that close if he also persisted in making us rapists.

I suspect that's what he does when he's given up on an iteration being believable.

Just, what, for fun?

Yeah, although whether it's directly or because it's just one of the many flavors of torture he enjoys I couldn't tell you.

He can never cling to Kib a fraction as tightly as feels situationally appropriate, it'd leave bruises. I sort of want to confront Macalaure about being insensitive but he probably cleared it with Maitimo, Maitimo probably thought it'd be amusing....

Kib on the other hand can squeeze as hard as he likes. Hilarious.

Macalaure finds tragedy beautiful, it's not his single most annoying characteristic but it's up there.