Clothes are a great way to show off crafting expertise and designs and patterns and things. Like jewelry. It'd be odd to go outside without clothes but only in the same way it'd be odd to go outside without jewelry - why wouldn't one want to?

Uh, possibly partly because of nymphs but possibly not, it's considered sexual. Male humans in informal settings sometimes go topless but otherwise we pretty much cover the whole torso and at least a few inches of leg, maybe with a gap around the waist, again in informal situations. Humans actually have laws about how much you have to be wearing to go out in public without being arrested - if you're a human; those laws in particular are pretty species-sensitive as laws go - and then places like school will have dress codes on top of that for what you are or aren't allowed to wear.

I see. Well I'm sure someone has good fabrics for swimming. Is it important to you that the rest of us do it? We're not human.

It's fine, she says. I'm pretty cosmopolitan about that sort of thing. I'd rather not swim naked myself today but I'll probably get used to it sooner or later.

What are nymphs?

I mentioned they're a species Mother Khaele made? They're all sort of like innate clerics; they can do healing magic. They're associated with plants - there's wild ones who have bits of forest or river or something, and there's domestic ones who have fields of crops, Khaele didn't seem to mind when people domesticated them and the nymphs don't seem to mind either. They can pretty reliably get a response out of her when they pray, although it won't necessarily be any good and they don't like to bother her about anything that doesn't seem urgent, and it's safe for them to try it as long as they're respectful, and they call her Mother. They're not allowed to wear clothes by divine mandate and sort of consider their physical humanoid bodies public property, as distinct from the fields or whatever, which they also 'are'. If something happens to their mobile bodies they respawn in their field or whatever.

That's interesting. We have minor Maiar who could do many of those things, but it wouldn't occur to one to describe them in that way, and they're not bound to a higher god any more than all the Maiar and Valar serve Eru - which, considering Melkor, is clearly not very much.

So the Maiar aren't sorted between the Valar sort of like the Aluendil only more so? I would've expected that but I guess I shouldn't have.

They're just less powerful instances of the same thing the Valar themselves are.

Huh. We have more minor deities... and things that are close to ascending to divinity... and things that can compete on a level playing field with smallish gods even if they aren't divine particularly... but nothing exactly like that.

Perhaps because you have the concept of ascending to divinity in the first place. We don't have that. Perhaps it explains why you have so many cruel, selfish gods?

I think most of the big ones didn't ascend, or at least don't have known stories about ascent, but it is an occasional, possible thing. My impression - not that I studied comparative theology very much - is actually that the ascended ones have higher variance and some are much better than the average god, some worse. The worse ones are more likely to be picked off by their new peers.

He nods. We have different sorts of failings from the Valar. The mistakes I'd make with that kind of power would be very different than the mistakes they make.

I don't think gods are qualitatively different in that way, but then again even our nondivine people vary a lot so they'd have to be very systematically strange to stand out from the general population much in that respect.

They do sound like they vary a lot, yes. "Does anyone have fabrics for swimming?"

And I never even traveled outside the Imperium, everyone I've met self-selected for being able to get along with a specific human culture.

Someone has fabric for swimming, and races off to get it. Rúmil sits down, leans against a tree, picks a flower, and starts eating it. And for high tolerance for danger, one imagines. Or is the rest of the world even worse?

...The rest of the world actually is mostly worse, although I'm probably working off filtered information. Parts of it are better for individual species. A kobold might well be safer among other kobolds than in the middle of Enwich. But the Imperium is probably - depending on how good my information is - safer for humans and many other things; and the stuff that makes it locally variant is all about how one's neighbors react to one, and about how advanced the infrastructure in things like healing and transportation and making sure there aren't famines is, which the Imperium's quite good at. Not about universal problems like gods and monsters.

I have a personality inclination towards self-preservation and it won. I assure you that when I have lucid dreams I spend a lot of time imagining ascending to divinity and fixing literally everything. Imagining things is pretty safe.

What would the world look like once everything was fixed?

I'd probably split up a lot of people who can't stop fighting, put them on different planes and make it harder for people to go plane to plane to make trouble. Not all planes are inhabited yet, there'd be room. I don't know much about the nasty afterlives but I'd either move everybody into nicer ones or spruce them up so they were okay. Code of conduct for the gods and dragons and fae and stuff. I'd let science work, like it does here. While that was getting off the ground I'd fix some scarcity problems, maybe directly or maybe just by relaxing the laws of magic that mean you can't conjure certain things without ridiculously difficult and draining magic. There's a lot of parts of the world that are really poor and don't have good educational systems to turn out as many wizards and such as they'd need to catch up to their neighbors so I'd probably try to scale up the general idea of what my school is doing with having so many foreign students, incentivize that. Oh, and the horrors that live outside the crystal sphere, I'd need to figure out what the deal was with those and if they have any reason to exist or if they can just go.

...horrors that live outside the crystal sphere?

Oh, if you fly really high and the universe doesn't just keep making it the case that the sphere is higher than that, you can reach a sphere around the planet, and if it cracks, things come through. This has never been good. Messing with the sphere or the things that come out of it is very much epic business. Epic being a sort of catchall for 'people of a power level you might compose an epic about'.

I see. I don't think our planet is spherical; we would presumably have noticed that.