"...them and what knowledge of golem programming?"

There is very definitely something of approval on his face. "The Valar are not knowledgeable about golem programming."

"I mean, I guess if they can just stop it in its tracks or break it should it do something unexpected, that's a useful safety? Complicated golems are often activated with a couple puppet etchers on them ready to scratch out instructions and break them if they do something unexpected. The problem is when they usually behave like they're supposed to and then do something weird. Or when the maker's careless, but I'm not."

"I have confidence in your caution. They can in fact just stop it in its tracks if it does something odd, so there's reason to prefer complicated ones awaken when one is paying attention."

"Are they going to supervise it for, like, weeks? It can take a long time to evaluate golem stability beyond a shadow of a doubt and I have very unclear information about how the Valar allocate their time, like, on the one hand they are a two-digit number of deities who live weeks' travel away from what I understand to be your major population center, on the other hand they're consulted on architecture."

"Were consulted on architecture, back when Tirion was built. They used to have a much more hands-on approach and live here and mediate all our disputes and help build our houses and let people petition for their preferred weather and so forth, and eventually everyone reached the conclusion that this was unwise. So now they're at a distance that makes them not unapproachable but not easily called over to settle whose property an apple that has fallen from a tree has landed on."

"Oh, I see. But they're not dispositionally opposed to golem supervision."

"New things make them nervous. New things that could kill someone and ruin Tirion's perfect record would definitely get supervision."

"Literally nobody has died here? Ever?"

"No one has ever died in Tirion. A few people have died in all of Valinor - mostly in remote places in accidents where help could not be summoned in time - and in general the dead are swiftly returned to life when they do die, so it's not a catastrophe. But Tirion itself has never seen death."

"I'm now kind of worried that I showed up carrying some sort of awful human disease and have started a plague just by having a nosebleed in the street the other day."

"That's also the sort of thing the Valar would handle. The Eldar don't sicken easily, don't worry too much."

"Okay."

"The only person to die in Valinor and not be returned to life was my mother."

"...What happened?"

"She found living unbearable, and then when she was not ready to return to it the King decided that he desired to take another wife. It is the law of the Valar and of Eru himself that a person cannot have multiple wives, so for the King to remarry they had to keep her dead. And so she is still dead."

Blink. Blink.

"Other than that, though, this is the Undying Land."

"That seems like a really extreme reaction to somebody wanting to have a second wife."

"The Valar, because they are very powerful and don't understand Elves well, are prone to reactions that to our small perspectives look extreme."

"...is this why they're no longer in charge of apple disputes?"

"Also Maitimo is very good at apple disputes and needs to occupy himself somehow or he will probably get bored and have a coup."

"Coup as boredom relief. I haven't heard that one before."

"Valinor does not have any problems. It's good, of course, but a touch stifling. I take it that's not true where you're from."

"Not at all. If I were going to try to pull off a coup it'd be because someone was running a city-state unforgiveably badly."