Right, he says, sorry, and then he nibbles on the back of Kib's neck and there are no atrocities discussed all evening.

Mission success.

Findekáno congratulates him on it the next day. That was a good idea.

I'm pleased with how it turned out. He made some really interesting faces during the game. I was not expecting it to leave him in exactly the mood it did but I'm not complaining.

And now he has lots of good ideas on how to be evil, which hopefully he won't use.

Yes, although honestly he's got the turn of mind for it without help and could have gotten half of them from reading the books from my world. Not the ones having to do with oaths or osanwë, but most of the other stuff I didn't make up out of thin air.

I am pretty confident that even an evil Maitimo wouldn't overwrite peoples' minds with carefully-worded oaths if only because he'd find them boring.

It's out of character. It is not out of his theoretical capacity but it is out of character.

I don't see what you're getting at yet.

The only thing I'm aware of that does that dramatically enough is oaths. I don't know why the fuck he'd take one but if it were a stupid one or the circumstances changed after he made it -

Reasons like?

Uh, most obvously, a common thread in the visions is Fëanáro getting unstable, right? So he resolves to make some oath, and asks it of his children, because of course he would, and Maitimo thinks he can either get input on the wording by agreeing to take it or stay out of it and watch them all take a worse-worded version...

Yeah, Fëanáro goes off the rails. Shiny rocks are involved and - continue to be involved down the line.

You know something shiny rock related?

No. Not at all. But if there are persistent shiny rocks then they probably matter - ugh - is there a way to ask Fëanáro about this without getting him defensive and paranoid, he can get that way...

I don't know. I was hoping to have something more concrete than 'you know how people hate you because of prophecies you think are nonsense, I've collated a dozen of them and it looks like you're gonna go nuts, how about not going nuts'.

That is not likely to go over well, no.

And I could probably phrase it differently but I don't have different content handy.

Maitimo'd take an oath that changed him completely under a lot of circumstances, actually. Any time when he thought the alternative was having even less ability to steer the disaster he was inviting... we can warn him not to, but I don't know how much it'll help....

I don't know either. So the important thing is still finding a way to head Fëanáro off at the pass.

Maitimo'd be better at that than either of us. I told you Fëanáro dislikes me?