"Who's doing your Kinging?"

"Maitimo." He tries to keep his voice free of 'drama'.

"Might've guessed, might not, not sure. Singularity he didn't but maybe he would've if I hadn't come up with it first."

He is vaguely surprised Maitimo hasn't come in already, to make sure he doesn't say too much to this clearly-very-dangerous person. Or reached out to him over osanwë to make the terms clear and evaluate whether he's under appropriate oaths, even if he doesn't care to see the new Findekáno just yet. "His stated reason for delaying an assault on Angband proper is that we don't have a way to kill the Enemy yet. I suppose that's sufficient even without the expectation the Enemy can escalate past swords."

"Yeah. ...On the bright side if you don't have computers it is possible yours is doing waaaaayyyyy less torture than the other two."

"...oh?"

"Uh, in the other two Ardas captured people - don't even have to be alive, just have intact chips - can be handled like computer files. Edited. Sped up. Duplicated."

"He tortures prisoners but I don't think he can do that. Does it only work on people with chips -"

"Yeah, he didn't bother capturing Dwarves or anything - they don't have them."

"They're immune to osanwë. To all mind-affecting magic, actually."

"Sounds like a good deal. I guess it'd be better to be selectively immune? But still."

"Being uncoerceable into it is pretty nice." Maitimo likes asking him to give him the line to his private thoughts, to swear he's done so and not just added layers in his head...

"Yeah, probably some personal variance on how important a desideratum that is. Edie - the other demon - chipped herself, she likes the telepathy a whole lot, I was less keen."

"Because it lets people copy you, or because oaths are frightening, or -"

"Didn't know people would be able to copy me at first, that took some discovering - it was your alt, actually - oaths are frightening, telepathy kinda weirds me out, Mandos is bad at his job, I generally like to understand anything I'm going to install in my brain real well..."

"The chips are what lets Mandos reembody Elves, in the worlds where Elves have chips?"

"Yeah, although even the Mandos who is a demon doesn't have the copy trick, he has backups that aren't mediated by his demon magic."

"...how do you know that?"

"If he were doing it my way and faking having to do actual backups, then the Silmarils would not be able to catch the backup data midstream because there wouldn't actually be any, and yet they can."

"They can what?"

"You will need to ask somebody else for more concrete detail on that, but doing an end run around Mandos for backup-related needs was I think the principal purpose of the things? They're also too smart to be demon-made and still work."

"So what would the purpose of ours be, because we definitely have them and I don't think they'd have been designed to do that."

"I have no idea what yours are for."

"And our Fëanáro's long dead."

(He saw the message almost as soon as it went out, but spent the intervening time hiding and complaining to Tyelcormo about how awkward this was going to be.)

(He gets over it.) 

(He comes downstairs.)

"Oh? How'd he pull that off?"