"Yeah."

"So I can send Maitimo a drone message and he can summon Aoide and she can put some populations back where they belong minus their prion diseases."

"Minus their prion diseases?"

"Enemy got real cute with ways to kill people."

...Scale model of all the people her Melkor has killed with prion diseases?

"Well, fuck."

"Locals didn't understand it past the river being poisoned, didn't look escalatory..."

"Why was he trying to avoid escalation?"

"Valar wouldn't show up and ruin his fun if it looked like a fair fight."

Snort. "Naturally."

"The Valar were kind of aggressively unhelpful, yeah."

"Doesn't surprise me in the least."

"I guess yours at least couldn't issue a Doom, that not being a daeva power."

"Doom?"

"My Noldor had to fight their way off Valinor, they weren't supposed to leave, and the Valar got pissed and cursed them. I went to the Valar and was like 'have you considered that based on the wording of this thing it could leak into other worlds' and that's when they interdicted summoning. Did limit the Doom to the bloodlines and not literally anyone who followed the Noldor in some way whether they'd been warned or not, though."

"Ours did send us off with a few parting ill-wishes but I wouldn't expect those to have any particular metaphysical effect."

"Mine didn't definitely do anything but them being magic kinda things and not daeva I didn't want to chance it. Also meant I had to avoid being particularly follow-y at the Noldor."

"Well, I have definitely not gone out of my way to do that."

"They're pretty followable if you don't have a reason to avoid it, they have serious organizational competence going on."

"And they're really likeable on a personal level, too, or at least the ones I've met so far are."

"I may not have been relaxed enough or something to appreciate their personalities thus."

"...Well, if yours had to actually kill people at Alqualonde, that might have dinged their personability. And my primary reasons for liking Tyelcormo, for example, wouldn't necessarily apply to you."

"Yeah, they were probably under more stress in my version."

"Dunno how much of that is our different interventions and how much of that is different starting conditions."

"I didn't show up in time to avert Alqualondë."

"I'm really glad I did. I mean, people still died, but--it's going to do people a world of good that they didn't do it, I think."