This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
purposeful_glory
Look, if he wanted me to go yell rude things at a beach we might be able to manage, although I'd probably want to check how Ulmo answered a question he may have gotten around to answering by now first. I feel like Angband would be an extremely unhealthy environment for me to get anything done in.
I do not think he'd be satisfied with rude yelling at a beach. Though you should do it anyway, maybe not rudely, on the off chance Ulmo will help you, he has been known to do that.
Could offer to work from Angband but insist they stop the torture? I think he mostly does that for fun, not for strategic reasons, so he might be amenable. Or would being surrounded by dead-eyed suicidal broken Quendi who aren't actively being tortured still mess with your psychological - wait, that wasn't actually a rhetorical question when I started asking it but by the end of the sentence it totally was.
Could offer to work from Angband but insist they stop the torture? I think he mostly does that for fun, not for strategic reasons, so he might be amenable. Or would being surrounded by dead-eyed suicidal broken Quendi who aren't actively being tortured still mess with your psychological - wait, that wasn't actually a rhetorical question when I started asking it but by the end of the sentence it totally was.
purposeful_glory
I mean, I know they're there. Could be a tossup in how it affects my work, honestly. But proximity allows mindfuckery and that's a problem, potentially an irrecoverable one.
I mean, the Oaths for this would need to be airtight. I'd spend several weeks writing them and go over them with a dozen different people. But you would definitely include 'no mind-affecting magic'.
purposeful_glory
It'd have to cover absolutely everyone capable of it in the place and a locally broad definition of 'mind-affecting magic' - I was horrified the first time I learned osanwë existed at all, for instance, I can live with communicative telepathy but that's it. And I wouldn't care to stay there literally all the time, I'm not an Elf and I miss people if I don't see them for five years. But merely being physically located in Angband is not necessarily intolerable even if occasionally I have to look at suicidal people.
purposeful_glory
Thanks. I think. There may be some reason this would still be a horrible idea, it just hasn't come to mind.
I'm not trying to fuck you over. I've gotten attached to the idea of being alive in four hundred sixty years, and for fate to get back on track after all this adventure would just feel so disappointing.
The Elf you're unwilling to hand over to Sauron is fated to a hopeless campaign to fulfill his word that starts to look increasingly like repeated attempts at suicide-by-other-Elves, massacring his way across the continent until the name of his house is synonymous with crimes we thought only Melkor could dream of, until at last he's free of the oath that restrains him from ending his life. Don't hand him over to fate either.
purposeful_glory
I'm not planning on handing anyone over to fate. It just depends on what shiny things I need to pick up in my galaxy to bludgeon this universe into behaving.
Well. Thanks for dropping by. When you're empress of the galaxy and deciding whether to shred me for various horrible things that I really probably did do, keep in mind that I'm also by far the most helpful neutral party on the continent.
Did Melian tell you she's good? Because she might be lying to herself rather than to you, but she's crossed lines I would balk at.
I don't fuck people who are too entranced with me to remember their own names. But if I did, I'd let them out within three hundred years, and if I didn't do that, at least they wouldn't end up bonded to me for eternity.
purposeful_glory
I didn't say she was a real stand-up gal whose decisions I will unhesitatingly defend, I'm saying I'm not sure you have her beat on helpfulness. ...Do Maiar who are not her have anything resembling sex lives, as long as we're on the subject?
Most people haven't gone to the trouble of assembling a full biological body, and if you just went for something with the look and texture you wouldn't get anything out of it. The reason anyone does go to all that trouble is that having your senses wired through incarnate neurology is an experience like nothing else.
Which is to say yes, we do, most of us who aren't literally the Enemy with consenting parties. I've been needling she sends the impression of a wordless soaring sound , who you're calling river-Maia, to figure out how to biological for three or four Ages.
Which is to say yes, we do, most of us who aren't literally the Enemy with consenting parties. I've been needling she sends the impression of a wordless soaring sound , who you're calling river-Maia, to figure out how to biological for three or four Ages.
He wasn't actually evil back then, unless he was doing an exceptionally good job hiding it, but yeah, figured you'd find that a dealbreaker. I'll get over my broken heart.