"Oof. Yeah."

"Everyone else we have with us is on a standard binding which definitely prohibits all kinds of killing people. I should probably figure out what 'no killing people who aren't chipped, no chip-destroying' looks like, because in a mess like the one on Endorë the less latitude you give people the less they can do to actually help. And we have to continue pretending to care about chip-destroying."

"Wait, how do you not have this already, doesn't 'no chip-destroying' allow killing babies in your world."

"Oh, it's super illegal, but I wasn't too worried Edie was going to go around killing babies and we were expecting we'd need the option to kill orcs."

"Your orcs aren't chipped? Singularity's are."

"No, they are. Which is why when we didn't have a better solution we considered killing them all in a non-chip-destroying way so we could bring 'em back after we had Melkor secured. It would have been really, really ugly - we'd have lost all the young children -"

"Yeah. And orcs have a ton of kids."

"They don't draw circles for him constantly or anything. If we'd killed his summoner before he realized we were trying to do that we could have been the first to bring him back, before they even had time to start trying. It seemed like it might be the right thing to do, blowing up Earth. 

There's a reason I'm fairly defensive about what you did - there but for the grace of the landlords -"

"Thank you landlords," murmurs Cam.

"And I don't think I'd try for the multiverse, after that, either." Sigh. "Nechar was telling me how his world's all nice, and everywhere else is just varying depths of shithole - I thought our world was nice, before the Enemy showed up."

"Was your Endorë nice too?"

"Yeah. Bit of a freedom/order tradeoff, but one everyone at least got to make freely. The Valar only enforced their laws in their system. Endorë's behind us in tech but was still post-scarcity."

"Singularity's Doriath was post-scarcity, rest of it wasn't."

"Is Singularity's Doriath ruled by a Maia -"

"Yeah."

"Tech level on Endorë's around that of Earth circa the late twentieth century, is that the same?"

"Maybe more midcentury but yeah."

"I think we're a little ahead of Singularity's Valinor too. It's probably the daeva."

"Probably. Do they directly have the extra tech and share or is it just that daeva-supported R&D is so much faster?"

"Mostly the latter. Chips are theirs, lots of daeva-specific systems security is theirs, can't say how much they did for us back in the early years, but the big difference is in daeva-supported R&D, and in making space exploration affordable."

"Singularity did have some lightleaper ships even before I turned up to expand the fleet... I think the magic god Valar do postscarcity too, just differently and more centrally."

"Maybe the magic god Valar are better at understanding their subjects."

"...I guess it's theoretically possible to be worse at understanding people than the magic god Valar..."

"Or maybe not. The Valar are aliens and millions of years old and daeva don't have particular advantages in intelligence, it was easy to follow why they were - the way they are. Magic gods have fewer excuses."

"Are your Maiar good at people?" Cam wonders.