"They could have sent me to the Outer Lands," mutters Bella.

"Should've. I don't know what they were thinking."

"...well, it's possible that I could've talked them down to that and they just panicked when Fëanáro ran into the room hollering that they were all Melkor's brothers and horrible, he'd followed me to Taniquetil."

"The Valar making terrible life choices around Feanaro does seem to be a thing."

"I should have actually said instead of just thinking that if they didn't like his fate they shouldn't have done anything to restrain the behavior of a well-intentioned person with free will. They wouldn't have listened but I wouldn't have to wonder if they might've."

"And considering what they actually did it probably couldn't've hurt much in the long run."

"Yeah."

"The Valar told us we couldn't win against Melkor but as far as I know Orome was the only one who knew I existed and we never mentioned my magic to him so--we thought--I have no idea what happened but Melkor must have been stopped somehow but my family's got to be dead I have no idea how Arda turned into Earth."

"I never met Oromë except as part of the group. I met Aulë, first, but I didn't get much out of the meeting because I was fresh from my world and gods were universally terrifying, and Lórien, he seemed okay."

"I met Orome once individually. He slowed my aging and made it so I wouldn't have accidental children and it was obvious that he and Tyelcormo loved each other." She shows her the relevant memory.

"I wish I had a better sense of the internal dissent among the Ainur - they can't agree on everything, Mandos sent people back tampered with but I got permission to un-tamper them -"

She shudders. "My husband's bisexual, it didn't come up before the wedding--it didn't come up at all until Tirion, when someone stopped me in the street--" she sends the memory "he said most people would feel betrayed for not having been told beforehand, but that they'd forgive you it if you promised you'd grown out of it or had it corrected." She shudders.

"I didn't know how to un-correct it. Illegal in my province to do that with subtle arts and I didn't know enough to reconstruct it for the reverse procedure - and no one asked me to - But I could take the fuzz off the memories."

"Well that's--better than nothing. But."

"Yeah. ...So I gave a really passive-aggressive lecture on therapeutic ethics. I don't think it helped. Just agitated people. Mandos didn't care."

"Somehow I'm not surprised. It was Mandos who delivered the Doom."

"Ugh."

"Fucking Valar."

"Fucking Valar."

"I did like Orome. But that's not--worth it."

"They must just - value the appearance of consensus really highly, I think."

"They're not--people, or at least not the way we're people, they don't have human psychology--I mean, Quendi psychology isn't exactly like human psychology, but the Valar are something else entirely."

"Yeah. Some of the Maiar are pretty peopley. Olórin was always nice to me. Helped me do wizardry research. Kept hoping something would explode."

"A reasonable desire."

"Alas, never came up. I wasn't researching combat spells."