"Yes! Congratulations!"

Again, please?

She repeats the procedure again, again, again -

He is swooping giddily around the sky. I can turn left but not right. I'm not sure how much of a problem that actually is. Are you going to get into trouble for using all this effort, or are large landscapes not costly after all?

She snorts. "I'm sure simulating a whole continent at the level of resolution a Quendi needs for it to look right would be ridiculously expensive on the hardware I'd be able to dig up at home. Probably easier to do with something offworld but Asgard just doesn't have the demand for it. I have no idea if mind control runs on the same rules." She makes a right turn, sends along the feel of it.

He crashes. I think I know what I'm doing wrong.

She goes to ground beside him to launch him again. "Oh?"

He sends a thought along in response. Launches, gains some altitude, turns right. Explain 'hardware' to me.

She flies and sends feedback. "For silly aesthetic reasons Asgard doesn't use most of the advanced technology we've figured out or picked up from other races, but if you start with something that can do extremely simple math -" Basic circuit. "And put a lot of them all together, you can get it to do more complicated math. And you can perch all kinds of things on math. Calculators and text are simplest, but you can do pictures, moving ones like my illusions if you like, simulate physics. There are certainly computers in the wide multiverse that, hooked up to the right doodads, could convince you of a whole continent; but I don't have any and more importantly the Enemy doesn't have any. I don't know where he did get Ungoliant from but apparently it wasn't a very tech-heavy place."

Beyond the Void.

"Which sounds to me a lot like 'from another planet' but I don't remember ever reading about a planet with giant light-eating spiders, and I can't look it up till I can get home." Flash of the library like she showed Lúthien.

Longing. The one back home was not as big but given three more centuries it would have been. Father spent most of his personal resources on scribes, there was a law that if you wrote a book the royal libraries got to copy it.

I'm going to give him a sheet of my notebook now I have my trick with sticking illusions to myself and don't have to conserve the paper. Maybe he'll be able to reverse-engineer whatever it's treated with so it lasts.

He starts considering the problem and then stops, in case somehow Moringotto can rip the answer out of his head. I will be relieved when I wake up, but I think I'll also find it extremely painful. Was that your goal?

And here I thought we were having fun flying around. Well, at least I'll be able to tell Findekáno that you were happy for about thirty seconds.

There really isn't any evidence that would convince me. You realize this is at least the tenth time, assuming no one has meddled with my memory, and that I am reasonably sure they have?

That too? This realm is just full of fun facts. Giant spiders and memory tampering and Valar. Look, if he can do that, what makes you think he didn't construct you an actual hallucination-person? I could be built from the ground up on some hapless substrate to think I'm exactly who I say I am. It'd make me seem more consistent and everything. I don't think that happened, but you don't know it hasn't, do you?

Valar can't create thinking life. It's their one known inability.

Maybe Eru had one of his moments of being a halfway functional deity and pitied me like I was a Dwarf because all I wanted to do was fly around this hallucination being really helpful.

Maybe you're a servant of the Enemy who gave your word in the heady optimism of youth and now wishes you hadn't and makes your mind games very pleasant. Why do you care what I think of you?

Because I know you're real, and you haven't descended to the level of my estimation where that stops mattering.

Amusement. How does one do that?

Well, distinguish two senses of 'care what someone thinks of me', here - I might wind up having to care what Mandos thinks of me if it turns out I've acquired the right or possibly wrong kind of soul in my travels and find myself trapped in his Hall until he likes how my mind's shaped. But the way I understand him to operate is so fundamentally abhorrent that I would not approve of myself one iota more if he turned out to think I was great for some reason, nor one iota less if he finds me as disagreeable as I'd expect him to. And if he had no power over me I wouldn't care in either way. Meanwhile, you have no power over me except to be annoying insofar as I care to spend time on you, which I can stop doing at will; but you are not an abhorrent person at all, just self-flagellating and through no fault of your own trapped in the belief that I'm fictional.