"Great for your emotional range, five hundred years of endless war against the ultimate horror."

Squeeze.

Squeeze. "I'm okay."

"I'm glad."

"I think this family will somehow always have at least one sane member."

"One or more depending on your definition of sane, sounds about right."

"Shall we go in and go rescue my mopey brother?"

"Sure."

So in they go. Mopey brother is reading at the bar. "We need a plan for when they're ready to start rolling out their empire," he says. "Worlds around 20th-century-Earth-tech they're going to mostly ignore on a first pass, hand out vaccines and stuff but that's all, they can't easily assimilate them like lower-tech worlds."

"Invite them to a consortium?"

"I think that's a good idea. On what terms, how much local autonomy, how much power does the emperor actually have..."

"Is this a conversation we should be inviting him to or very much not?"

"Him being my alt who wants to be an emperor?"

"Yes."

"I don't know where to find him. I can summarize the discussion for him later if we come up with anything."

"Could ask Idaia's demon alt for his room number."

"That seems a bit much when there's absolutely no hurry."

"I suppose."

"A lot of it depends on what exactly they can offer, but, yeah, unifying Earth under one world government would be really difficult and inconvenient and require a lot of people deployed consistently to manage it."

"Although if they have a nice enough empire and open borders--which is not, I will grant, a given--it might come out to almost the same thing, eventually."

"That'd be the most appealing way to do it, yeah. Drop in, announce that anyone who'd like can immigrate - they have portals? They could set up portals in places - hand out tech, move on."

"Seems about right.

...I wonder if the Valar would react to that."

"Well, I take it they're not going to try this until they can take a Vala. But if they don't drop portals in Valinor I doubt it and if they do drop portals in Valinor, yeah probably."

"I wonder if they're likely to do that."

"Yes."