"According to Thuringwethil he used to be nice enough but I'm not sure her opinion is worth the paper I didn't bother printing it on."

"Problem with checking whether the Enemy's still evil is that apparently, given warning, he can run away."

"I might be able to hold him given the knowledge that I knew I had to be doing that - in Edda-adjacent worlds, anyway - but I'm not positive - may depend on how exactly it is they moved and I don't know if even a reasonable-ized Vala would want me to perform the experiment -"

"If they were inclined to help with that I'd start worrying Elspeth did mind-control. Maybe Aule."

"Yeah, maybe a reasonable-ized Aulë."

"I don't do mind control unless I'm pretty much hitting somebody hard enough to kill them."

"If I thought you did I'd be having much more trouble pretending to be sociable right now."

"I take a pretty dim view of mind control. There's a couple witches who manipulate emotions left alive - one of them can't turn it off but she's got a pretty sharp range limit, other one uses it to wrangle newborn vampires because they're pretty out of control and dangerous."

"It was a favored tactic of the Enemy. He can't directly control minds but he can coerce oaths or he can tamper with memories at will and then run you through scenarios until he gets a result he likes, and it often came out to nearly the same."

"Yes, I've received the summary of who this template is and why we do not approve of him. Witches occasionally can directly control minds. Chelsea at least is dead."

(Helpful mental footnotes.)

"...good."

"Yeah, I hope she's not a recurring theme."

"Cam checked?"

"Yeah. None in worlds extant."

"Loki, can your magic do invulnerability to mind control? If we're going to be wading unsuspectingly into dimensions where some people have it casually - it would be a disaster if something got you - I've asked my father also, obviously -"

"I could rig something up - spellbinders will have something faster if they can have anything at all, though."

"I can extend my shield. It's not effortlessly sustainable, but it's doable for scouting intervals with people I like."

"I think my father's pretty close to unbounded working memory for the Marlatians, so perhaps that can be a stopgap until they're omnipotent six times a day."

"If only the Tesseract would cheer up it could assess people for potential to get along with the Mind Stone but I have no idea how long it's going to take it to get over the existence of locations it can't reach."

"We can always try it with space Elves on distant asteroids."

"This does still have failure modes."

"Such as?"

"It's the Mind Stone. It could easily choose an expression of displeasure that was not destroying the rock its handler stood on. I'm not even positive it couldn't backpropagate effects to other forks of the same person."

"So we find a space Arda that's out of neighborhood, or send forks out of neighborhood."