"Poor orcs," murmurs Cam.

"If we merely find a way to dismiss him and he's anticipated we'll do this he can have them all drawing circles to bring him back. And we weren't, prior to having this opportunity, optimistic we could do anything better than finding a way to dismiss him."

"Oh, I more than understand - just, I met some orcs. I feel generally sorry for orcs."

"We conjure their media but I don't know much else about them."

"On my Endorë most of them wound up swearing oaths to Melkor as what used to be a harmless coming of age ritual, and then..."

"Swearing oaths as a coming of age ritual. Not that I blame them, just -"

"The ones who belonged to irreligious families were encouraged to move up north and were quietly executed."

"Chipped - we can bring them back too, we can't do anything about the oaths - maybe there's a research project, seeing if you can write to a chip a version of a person without an oath they swore -"

"Yeah, I'm going back to Endorë after I'm done with Valinor, that's the plan. Don't have a way to excise oaths at this time." Considered it with your alt but let's not bring that up.

"...again, something I shouldn't know or something you prefer not to talk about -"

Sigh. "You're very hard not to gossip at, you know that?"

"I'm very easy not to gossip at! You just have to let me know that I'm not supposed to!"

"Eh, the thing I actually didn't want to say was that they were involved, since that's a secret I only know because they were calibrating their discretion for everybody around them wearing homophobia goggles... there was brief consideration of resurrecting a you-instance prior to a stupid oath he'd sworn about Silmarils or by somehow extracting that content, wound up not going for that."

"Yeah, it's going to require a seriously dubious set of experiments to get that right and I don't mind instances of me being the test subject but I'd feel differently about it during the war when I needed my head untampered with - it'd be a problem for me too if I were involved with my cousin, for different reasons, but I don't think the reasons extend far enough for it to be inconvenient for me that there's an alternate universe where we are. Or, uh, were."

"What's the problem in your version?"

"He's my cousin."

"Oh, okay."

"I'm trying to think of a way to remove oaths without reading through lots of chips of people swearing oaths and seeing what happens if we excise, write, and embody..."

"You could get before-and-after chips to read but that won't tell you what'll happen if you just delete the relevant bits."

"There are enough orcs it's probably worth doing some vaguely horrifying experiments while we're here. I'll set up a team."

"The orcs are entirely capable of living peacefully when the Enemy's not fucking with them. Killing and reembodying them all seems extreme."

"Oh, I don't think we should touch your set. Our set still has the problem that they'll all try summoning the Enemy back."

"Which means you have to kill them all anyway unless you can outright kill him, but once you've got him contained - I assume you're not just going to leave him in his Hell? - tampering further with the orcs seems likely unnecessary unless yours have different oaths or something."

"We don't know yet. Unlike yours, ours know about daeva and important information won't be conjurable. And we are definitely not planning on leaving him in his Hell but if it turns out that every extant magic system's way of killing daeva actually does nothing or just dismisses them, which is on our list of possible outcomes, then the best we've got is 'summon him under a really tight binding, leave him somewhere far away' and it would not surprise me at all if orcs are ordered to find and kill his summoner in that contingency."

"Fair enough."