"I don't know if your agent would have heard my joke about vacation days, but rumor has it a few years are nothing to you?"

"Clever. No. Time matters to you and you have probably already decided. Six days."

"That's not very long to get to the various far-flung people I might want to consult about your claims, catch and interrogate samples of orcs, contemplate going to Valinor and vainly filing a complaint even more than I have already contemplated that..."

"In six days if you want the offer to remain open you can bring me proof you're considering it, and from then you have two years."

"How do you prefer to receive proof about my considerations?"

"You stole something of mine. I'd like it back."

"Six days to figure that out, then, too. If you aren't intelligent enough to put it together the offer's withdrawn on those grounds."

"...Wait, do you mean the prisoners? I don't even know where to find them." Just one of them.

"Six days."

"Is the concept of caring about time so alien that you can't actually figure out how people who do it schedule anything, I'm honestly curious."

"I swear to you, before Melkor, before Eru, before the powers of this earth, that there are thousands of times as many orcs as Elves and Men. That orcs will not suffer for the next six days. That, should you bring me Maitimo Nelyafinwë within that time, orcs will not suffer for the next ten years. That if you accept my job offer, orcs will not suffer for as long as you serve us. I swear this on all of my powers to act within Arda."

"I'm told intent matters. Define suffer."

"The orcs exist in constant torment. Your touch heals it. Every orc in the world now feels as they would had you healed them."

"So you don't mean, for example, that Melkor will lay off the tortuous mindreading, or that they will not be sent to die in droves on Elves' swords, or that they're all going to be upgraded from whatever presumably overcrowded quarters you have them sleeping in..."

"I don't mean any of those things, but I am willing to consider any and all of them once you bring me proof you are negotiating in good faith."

"And proof I'm negotiating in good faith means hauling you Maitimo all the way here in six days. I actually can't think of a way to do that even if I were so inclined. It doesn't seem likely to help against the Valar at all, either, which mutual interest is much of the basis for this entire charade." She thinks Maitimo might notice if she turned up and spouted ridiculous lies about why he needed to be here, and she can't bodily kidnap him and fly at the same time, and also, um, no.

"The way you phrased that makes me unsure if you are actually clear on what it would cost me."

"By all means explain."

"I'm not sure how your whole 'not having free will' deal works. Day to day, the species that don't have free will seem to work kinda like the ones that do unless somebody, oh, swears an oath. I buy that there's more going on there, and maybe it feels really different from the inside. I could contemplate becoming a collaborator of sorts. You seem reasonably good at targeted bribery, I could imagine finding positive-sum trades to make at least to the extent that you just really have it in for the Valar. But ultimately, there's a fundamental difference between things I do and things that happen. Things do not happen through me. And you didn't hold up two bundles of people and say, 'hey, Loki, which of these should I torture'. You want me to fetch you one. Which, again, I cannot actually - think of a way to do without his cooperation," she amends midsentence.

"Turn him into a bird, walk out of the Dwarf city and here. It is not a six day walk."

"No, more like twice that! How fast do you think I walk?"

"...twelve days, if I verify you're on your way."

"Verify how?"