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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.
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purposeful_glory
Your father told me he wasn't that smart. Maybe he's not, but Thauron is. If I seem relaxed in the dialogue mind I was speaking entirely out of illusions emanating from a rock he was holding and my capacity for sarcasm is one of the last things to go.
Would you volunteer?
purposeful_glory
If I had little to no strategic value yes. As things stand no, he can't have me in that or any capacity; I'd be trading you for the decade, not for time to actually think. I don't know your actual strategic value and it does not, here, belong to me to compute. I don't know what your city is worth, I don't know how hard it would be to string your father along for a decade saying I hadn't happened to visit you until he gets me my eidetic memory and has no choice but to take every science book I can throw at him, I don't know how much you care about orcs who would presumably continue to spend the duration of their painless time trying to kill everyone you love. I don't know if I should have asked you. But I would have wanted to be asked. So I did.
I do not regret having more information. If my answer of 'yes' is a consequence of believing all this is a game anyway, and that this is the game's most satisfying resolution for me given that it's certainly going to end with more torture anyway, what does that change?
purposeful_glory
If you tell me you wouldn't go if this were reality I won't take you there. I know better. I am sure you can lie to me convincingly if you decide you want to do that, of course.
If it's reality I don't know enough about you. If you really think you can win this in thirty years then reconciliation with my cousins doesn't feature in any important calculus, that is not going to be decisive, and I don't have skillsets relevant to building either impossible memory artifacts or city-destroying bombs either faster or with greater certainty. If it's reality the question is 'can you lie to my father for long enough' and I don't know you.
purposeful_glory
It's a lot of ifs. Ten years for the eidetic memory and that's if singing to reality can grab information lost to my mind but present in another reality not habitually sung to, if his estimate's right, if he lives that long, he was dying when I got here and something could get him more thoroughly next time. From there it's things like - can they find a uranium mine, or whatever it turns out they need which might not be a uranium mine because I don't remember. Would a nuke so much as inconvenience a Vala, they can build cylindrical planets, they can manufacture tardy suns, maybe tanking that kind of energy is easy. I'm not putting all my bets on it. It would work fastest if it works. There are a dozen reasons it could simply not.
Do your other plans suffer significant costs from my family irretrievably hating you?
purposeful_glory
Plan B is learn to teleport, go back to my galaxy, buy destruction off the shelf until something sticks and everybody in the business wants to know what I'm trying to kill, maybe if I'm really desperate go grab the Tesseract in my bare fucking hand again because that would sure as fuck do it if the thing felt cooperative a second time. If their hatred takes the form of making it inconvenient for me to do that, yes, otherwise no it would just make me sad and I can pare down the resulting fits of distress into a rounding error timing-wise.
...I would very tentatively expect that if they learned somehow that Thauron offered you something in exchange for me, and you made the trade, they'd not only try to make it inconvenient but would consider stopping you a top priority. That's obviously the bet he's making, but he doesn't have perfect information either.
I also don't think I can volunteer but we can probably get around that.
I also don't think I can volunteer but we can probably get around that.
No, I mean, I'm not sure but I expect the Oath prevents us from sacrificing ourselves to the Enemy in fits of tragic heroism. If I think it's detrimental to the war effort and I know it will render me in the future unable to pursue my goals, I actually cannot do it. I'm pretty sure if I tried to go surrender to Thauron because it was the right thing to do I'd find my feet unable to move for reasons unrelated to trauma.
I can make observations about the course I'd pursue if I thought this were real and wasn't bound not to give in to that kind of pressure. And since I don't think this is real, I'm not impeded from agreeing with you. And you could fix this entirely by promising that if I did this you'd return the Silmarils or something. But I don't think if he'd asked me, and I believed it was a real choice, I'd be free to make it.
I can make observations about the course I'd pursue if I thought this were real and wasn't bound not to give in to that kind of pressure. And since I don't think this is real, I'm not impeded from agreeing with you. And you could fix this entirely by promising that if I did this you'd return the Silmarils or something. But I don't think if he'd asked me, and I believed it was a real choice, I'd be free to make it.
purposeful_glory
...do I have the full story on the deal with the Silmarils? I mean, I don't have any particular use for the Silmarils myself so I'm not going to hang onto them should they fall into my possession, but I'm pretty optimistic that their purpose can be substituted so I have no independent reason to prioritize ferrying them anywhere...
We're committed to retrieving them. Mostly because my father needs costlier signals of trust when he's under more pressure and the destruction of our home and death of our grandfather was a ton of pressure. But partially because he's less optimistic than you that their purpose can be substituted, and we are desperate to someday live outside the Valar's power. Anyway, it's rarely relevant because I have full freedom of action on anything that helps the war effort. It only matters here because this pretty clearly hurts the war effort by a hard-to-discern amount in exchange for helping orcs.
purposeful_glory
Come to think of it I don't know what this will do to my ability to suborn them.
That would explain why he'd make the offer. If your credibility in dealing with them comes from the healing, they may have decided it's in their interests to lessen the endless pain anyway - especially if as Thauron claimed it serves no strategic purpose.
I'm not confident that is what is going on, but it's possible.
...we should also expect that what he'll do, if we do this, is go to my family and swear he's being truthful and then share the contents of your previous conversation and whichever one you have when you hand me over.
I'm not confident that is what is going on, but it's possible.
...we should also expect that what he'll do, if we do this, is go to my family and swear he's being truthful and then share the contents of your previous conversation and whichever one you have when you hand me over.
purposeful_glory
He'd just show up like that? I was assuming there was probably a reason that the heavy hitters didn't just routinely waltz into key settlements and obliterate them and I was assuming it was enough reason that he didn't have effective free communication lines to your family.
The reason is that they don't handle massed combat well and have limited mobility in that kind of fight and ten thousand people would die but so would his current physical form, we would make damn sure of that, and I expect he doesn't want to be sidelined for the next few centuries.
Coaxing them into communicating would be easier, especially if I'd just died under mysterious circumstances. In general my family knows enough that they'd stop listening the instant he opened his mouth, but I have some reckless stupid relatives.
Coaxing them into communicating would be easier, especially if I'd just died under mysterious circumstances. In general my family knows enough that they'd stop listening the instant he opened his mouth, but I have some reckless stupid relatives.
purposeful_glory
Ugh. I was told nobody had ever killed a Balrog, either. They're both Maiar, I don't know how much Maiar vary, can I just go kill the fucker - still can't get any frost powers working but I've got my usual and songs -
Maiar vary from 'forest spirit that gives this spring minor healing powers' to, well, Thauron. Or Ossë or Uinen. Melian's up there. You might be able to pick a fight with him and live, but I don't think you'd win it. Also, at a guess, werewolves being ridiculously easy to kill and then obediently leading you to him suggests more that he wanted to spend a few werewolves getting your guard down than that they're actually useless. Challenging him in his home territory does not strike me as wise.
purposeful_glory
Would he have known where the Men were going to show up and been waiting for them?
I have no idea.
purposeful_glory
He did have a weird invisibility curtain thing set up but I don't know how long that would take.
He's very good at illusions. I was only able to tell this wasn't one of his because of your temperament, it's not one he'd play.
purposeful_glory
The question isn't is he good at them, it's is he fast at them, enough that I shouldn't assume he's been lying in wait building up power for a few hundred years in the future birthplace of Men, who are by the way very weird to talk to at age three weeks appearance Midgardian young adult.