"I am vaguely tempted by straight-up mindreading but I know I shouldn't be."

"Yeah that part's sketchy."

"Checked with Edie. Mind-affecting Arda songs affect daeva, but it wears off faster after the singer stops for you than for us, and isn't permanent even if they keep singing."

"Well. That's better than nothing."

"Substantially so. Had Edie test them on me, they're - not mind-hijacking, I'm not afraid of any of us working for the Enemy under their influence, but it's weird and it'd be lovely if magic couldn't do that."

"Weird like...?"

"It is disconcerting to be able to identify a thought process as untrustworthy and not distrust it."

"...that sounds freaky yes."

Squeeze. "Thus asking Edie not you."

Snuggle. "Thank you."

"One of these worlds will have highly exploitable magic and we will fix Singularity and become omnipotent and you will not have to worry about it."

"I appreciate this optimistic projection."

"I am a very optimistic person. I was not joking about keeping Matt around to be depressing at me for the sake of the multiverse."

"I wonder how he picked 'Matt'," Cam says. "I guess it's loosely soundalike."

"And appropriate for a government job in the 70s, he said, you'd be better equipped to evaluate that than I am..."

"Oh, yeah, it's a thoroughly boring and commonplace Anglophone name."

"They got a lecture from their Valar once about how Manwë is king of the whole world, which they took to mean powerless outside it, and when the humans developed space flight they - stopped moping, I guess..."

"Small step for man, giant leap for mankind, spectacular pick-me-up for Elves."

"My father was over the moon about it too! Literally, he pulled rank and got himself onto the third landing on Araman."

"I've been to Luna but only on summon. Same with Mars."

"I was going to go to Endorë once all the politics and - stuff - died down."

"Tourism?"

"Not really, wanted to try to close the tech gap. I'd, um, Findekáno and I'd been thinking we could do it with ten demons and a couple of years, before Melkor got started and everything went to hell."

"So to speak."

"In all but the most desperately desired sense of it."