"I assure you I very much envy the other Ardas their physical plausibility, if not their wars; ours seems to be the least bad such a war can be."

"Yeah, congratulations on that."

"The fact it's fought with swords isn't me."

"But the fact it's been three hundred non-escalatory years is. Did you anticipate that he was holding back, or did you have some other reason for not pressing the advantage -"

"First war of the Valar and Melkor crumbled continents. I knew we'd have to invent something better than what we had, even if I didn't know how much better it'd need to be..."

"How far'd you get on that?"

"My father's dead. Curufin has Dwarven friends and they might have been able to pull it off eventually but knowing what we know now, it probably still wouldn't have been enough..."

"Dwarves are neat. Mine weren't working on the war much..."

"The locals hunted them for sport and used their blacksmiths as forced labor and cleared out a few of their cities for Elves to live in. They were very deeply unimpressed with Elves by the time we showed up. We had to be extremely patient and sensible at them for a century or so, and very conspicuously hardworking and innovative and value-creating, and then we had the privilege of talking to people who wanted to help on research for the war."

"Wow. Mine were isolationists, they shot at me a lot before acknowledging that wouldn't work and talking to me."

"The ones who weren't slaves were also isolationists. Like I said, it took a while."

"Is everyone in your world evil."

"By your standards, probably."

"Dwarves sound like they could be the same..."

"They killed a lot of people in varying-degrees-of-organized-and-purposeful guerrilla violence but under the circumstances I don't blame them in the slightest. Could be the same."

"Closer comparison would be required."

"How does your Mandos reembody people?"

"When our bodies die our souls go to the Halls of Mandos - they can also just wander, but that's dangerous, Enemy could possibly scoop them up, usually you go to the Halls - and then Mandos corrects your faults and then restores you to life."

"Corrects your faults. That's not ominous at all."

"He also does it to the living, once a yeni, I always got around it by swearing myself straight and Eru-fearing and otherwise unobjectionable and so forth, time-limited. But that wouldn't pass when you're actually dead, he can read every thought and experience you've ever had off you."

"Which part?"

"The mindreading part, mostly."

"You can refuse Mandos' correction but then you just stay bodiless forever."

"That doesn't really help."