"Uh, I think they're about some particularly high-leverage way to be evil which they don't want to explain in enough detail that anyone else could rederive it."

"...some high-leverage way to be evil which he could accomplish from prison as extortion, or...?"

"Yes. Or could undo as a condition of release. Or something."

"...so 'rehabilitated' may mean 'skilled at bribery'."

"It has crossed my mind. Anyway, he's out and supposedly supervised. The Valar - as you may have guessed - do not actually watch us much at all, it's not clear if they can, but him they're keeping an eye on."

"I'd hope they don't watch us much."

They like me. They, ah, wouldn't.

...They probably have no strong opinion about me and some reason for general caution and occasionally even when I am not in your company I value my privacy.

I meant it as evidence, not reassurance. If they watched us they would not like me.

Fair enough.

"You can go meet Melkor if you're curious. He has a house on the outskirts of the city."

"He lives in a house?"

"He's currently bound to Elven form. Reduces avenues of trouble."

"Suppose that makes sense. I am curious but just sort of dispositionally, I'm not sure what I'd actually say to him."

"I haven't been."

"Yeah, where does one go for a conversation opener there. 'So, I hear you used to be evil, what was up with that, can I adapt your heartwarming redemption story for my world's prison system'?"

"People ask for help, sometimes, he's still a Vala, he knows a lot about the makeup of the world and can do a lot of magic. Or for personal apologies, which by all accounts he gives readily- it's an odd equilibrium, but I'm not sure what I'd want instead."

"Yeah. What kinda magic can he still do while in troublemaking-restricted lockdown?"

"Changing and shaping things, creating energy, imbuing random objects with magic - they can do it much faster than we can, can do things that we don't know how to do - he might in fact be able to make humans immortal, that'd be worth checking."

"Yeah, I'm sort of wondering if the other Valar are going to have a response on that one before I'm like forty... 'creating energy'?"

"Our world's working definition of magic is things that create physical material from nothing, change physical material in ways it wouldn't usually change without being heated a lot, or directly creating heat, light, sound, etcetera. Those are the things that are magic; they're all hard to do lastingly. The Valar can do them mostly at will. You should ask my father if you want an explanation more sophisticated than that."

"They're not hard for servantmakers to do lastingly. Well, some of them, I can't create physical material from nothing."

"Yes, your magic can do a lot of things ours - well, I'm not positive you couldn't make a golem with our magic, but it'd be the project of Ages. I've never seen anyone but Macalaurë or an Ainu create physical material from nothing and Macalaurë can't do it very precisely. Yet."

"What can he make?"

"Snowflakes in the air when he's singing, or mist. Nothing big, but a big deal once you know what our magic generally can and cannot do."