Thuringwethil lazily raises a hand and digs a trench for her. You have more range than me. Can you only do, like, super specific shit?

Kinda. In goes rock. I can do whatever, but I have to learn how and I have only learned how to do a certain number of things.

Bat, fly, is stopped in midair, contests the symbol. It doesn't take quite as long. Easier to tell it to fuck off, but I definitely still feel it.

Loki tries drawing the symbol directly on the ground, three times in a row.

Nope. Dirt-drawing doesn't count as engraving. The Elves should really know this shit, she says, de-bat-ing, it's their stuff.

I mean, it's possible they do and it just never came up. Brithombar has walls. The other strategies I've seen are "be Doriath" and "try to make it really inconvenient for a Balrog to be among you, maybe fail at that".

Brithombar is folks who never went to Valinor. It's the newbies who I'm wondering if straight-up forgot, because, yeah.

I will have to pass it on.

Whoopie-doo. This doesn't solve your Sauron problem. He will show up, blast the wall - maybe it takes him several hours, okay, that's time for you to tell the Men to run - and then have the rematch that he's itching for, and he at least seems under the impression that he can definitely kill you and might be able to take you alive depending whether there's any magic that works against ice powers.

Yeah. Do you know how to solve my Sauron problem?

I solved mine by agreeing to work with him when he had stuff that wasn't gratuitous torture for kicks. You could also try moving all the Men into a city defended by people who are actually willing to throw thousands of their own into pinning him there - you can put those things on armor, inhibits our freedom of movement - until you can come and icy blast. Or you could try going to the ocean and going "Ulmo, for fucks fucking sake" and hoping he takes pity on you.

I'm not sure the ice is decisive. He managed to get me off him while I was doing it and kept fighting for a while afterwards.

And three years later he goes all ice crystals whenever he wants a physical form. We can - draw our essence dry, in dire need. It's just a really bad idea.

I think we both went into that fight underestimating each other and my revised assumption is that he could take me until I make my next breakthrough. After that all bets are off.

Just be glad you didn't run into him before the ice powers - I'm assuming those were recently acquired? There's occasions I'd have expected you to use them if you had them - because if you had, you'd be in Angband now.

Recently mastered.

Well. Don't keep gambling, someday you'll lose.

If only I knew how to withdraw more of my stakes from the table.

Tell Sauron that you're having a great time and you're sure he is too, but you're both much more able to hurt each other than defend your own interests and that's the worst kind of war to fight, and you want to broadly discuss terms for an oath that he goes nowhere near the Men for a hundred years and doesn't send anyone or anything to harm them, and he'd better ask something of you that hurts the Valar instead of just being evil because you're not gonna just be evil, not your style.

Do you think that'd work?

I think he'd name you a price.

His previous ideas of a price for a thing include 'give him my magic sword'. Which is not the evilest thing I could do, it's great but it's not that great, but it still betrays an interest in carving off resources from me instead of aiming at mutual anything.

I don't think there's anything actionable in your shared interests at the moment. You don't know how to bring back the dead, which is the first thing that will really put you at odds with the Valar. Didn't he also suggest giving him information? That's sort of a mutual-interest thing. You could offer to hand him the Elf he wants with strong welfare conditions. You could suggest something yourself.

He cannot have the Elf he wants. Information will presumably be turned directly to miscellaneous evil. I'm honestly not sure what he might want in between 'evil' and 'fucking over the Valar' with the timescale of the first and the acceptability of the latter.

What is it about that one specific Elf? You're pretty good at making the right hard calls even when that involves killing friends of yours who trust you and so forth. Um. She runs a hand through her hair. It gets about a foot longer. She starts knotting it in her fingers. You could suggest to him that he start a new division of Angband in which everyone who works there takes an oath not to use anything they develop on any continent save Valinor, and then teach that division things you know.