He isn't. But he's an excellent liar. He pops over to greet them. 

"I'm sorry I sprung that on you, I should have tapped one of the others," Loki says.

"Unfortunately there's other bad news too!" Namely the thing where the Enemy there was just chased out and not actually dead because of the mishap with finding deadman's switches.

"Well. I guess if we kill them instantly we risk a deadman's switch and if we don't we risk an escape. And it could take a long time to find him worldleaping. Ugh." And to Loki, "Don't apologize, I am just glad it was discovered quickly. I nearly murdered him and then I suppose it might have been a problem but I successfully refrained! For a decade. Once it's not going to be politically disruptive I still strongly favor causing him to stop existing."

"Which prompts the question of what to do with the dead Elves from that world, because it seems likely to be a systemic cultural or even inherent - thing - rather than a one-off. An evil you is one thing, an evil one of your dad, say... The orcs I just asked the Elentári orcs if they wanted some dubious neighbors and they were happy to give it a try, so I shuffled them all onto the orc planet to Aetherize 'em, but..."

"An evil one of my dad seems likely to be a lot less strategic and responsive to incentives than an evil me, yeah. Murdering all of them seems a bit much.

You also can't, just, put a version of my father on a low-tech planet and trust he'll never find a way to get out anyway... do we have any ideas?"

"Elspeth reasonable-ized the Valar, so it's possible we could just solicit information on possible problem cases from Mandos. Sketchy, but, he already has it..."

(Elspeth would like to reasonable-ize more Valar. It seems like a worthwhile use of her time.)

"Reasonable Valar sound lovely. Maybe we can find an Arda from before the whole mess started, reasonablize them, Melkor never gets paroled..."

"Optimistically that might not even require reasonable-izing them, since we have information about what happens when he does get paroled, but Elspeth relaying the facts certainly wouldn't hurt."

"I don't mean to sidetrack the conversation but if you have Loki's spellsymbol concepts and could bounce them to Elspeth I could get on reading the spells."

"My pleasure." He does that. 

"Thank you," Bella says, and she starts paging rapidly through the book Loki illusioned for her.

"Do we have alts in the shadow vampire world, has anyone checked?"

"Out of Tesseract jurisdiction, but nobody recognizes the faces and Cam didn't turn up any local writing by any of you."

"The shadow vampire world? Are there other vampires we are being distinguished from?"

"Thuringwethil's technically a vampire? Dunno if she really counts. She's not as pretty as you or I'd have had a harder time keeping Loki off her."

"That was not a meaningful consideration!"

"You didn't tell me this story!"

"Thuringwethils are Maiar who are apparently technically vampires. And incompetently hit on us given the chance."

"And Loki spent decades in Arda - subjectively I think it was over a century - among Elves, who are I understand it not quite as hypermonogamous as vampires but enough so that they were lonely decades."

"Loki may actually be off-model in how bothersome that was. Not that Bella isn't unusual the other direction."

"Yes, yes. I even have an explanation for that."

"Oh?"

"It was socially acceptable. It was the only thing I had innate interest in that was also that. None of the others were suffering from a lack of this intersection."