"I'm sorry." He walks them into an elevator with a desk and comfortable chairs, hands Island some chocolates. "Displeasing how?"

"He's mid-project on setting the place up as a parliamentary democracy but the entire government is rigged to vanish if there are signs of his being deposed without planning on it and why does this elevator have furniture in it?"

"Designer was really excited about the concept of elevators from a perspective of 'you can change the view from your office at any time and also make it hilariously difficult for people to find it' rather than from the perspective of 'you can get between floors' so this building has a hundred thirty-six elevator-offices and then it has stairs to get between levels. 

In her defense it was part of a project to try to make Cam roll his eyes or make a discernable facial expression beyond 'distant despair'.

You think he's going to make it difficult to depose him, or do you think he's just accumulating what resources he has because very freaked out and is nonetheless still planning on the parliamentary democracy? 

Is that even a good idea, democracy only works if the populace isn't evil, right?"

"...that's very thoughtful of her, although I'm not sure Cam, uh, noticed, he probably just conjured from blueprints without looking very closely... Anyway, I'm not at all sure Evil Democracy is a good idea, he is definitely doing the freaked out thing and I may have managed to get him less freaked out by, like, actually telling him anything, which everyone else seems to have neglected to do, but not to the point where he and Island could have a civil conversation or anything drastic like that..."

"How was it incivil, exactly?"

"I implied he was a rapist and then we bristled at each other for a while."

"He, uh, is, right -"

"Yes, although his population is doing the obnoxious thing where they don't distinguish between various levels of consensuality if the people involved are gay."

"I've heard that one! 'If you've already stooped so low as to be fucking a man, it hardly matters if he's a consenting one!' And its delightful cousin that coerced sex is actually less disgusting because then it can be assumed to be about power or something. So he's got a loyal populace and if he doesn't want to be deposed he'll be a mess to depose, and we don't have much to offer him - do we have much to offer him -"

"I mean, I'm seriously considering 'let him run the damn place at least until we know what the fuck is wrong with it and how to fix that' as an option, aside from being personally upsetting because he looks like you guys and is ruling an Arda and we expect yous to be decent people and Ardas to be populated by pleasant harmless Elves the place isn't that much of a priority compared to random Edda and Edda-adjacent planets."

"Seems reasonable. They've been working on what the fuck is wrong with the place and how to fix it, dunno if they've gotten much of anywhere." His office lifts into the air.

"They're not producing reports or you're not keeping up with them?"

"The most recent report was a month ago and to the effect 'maybe the Valar and Maiar were just really terrible and it had downstream effects?' Valinor apparently had annual head-tampering for the purposes of correction, which Midnight evaded with time-limited mind-altering oaths, and it seems plausible that some combination of extra-terrible Vala therapy and mind-altering oaths to evade same broke his brain somehow or something."

"Extra-terrible Vala therapy does sound bad, I can't imagine they were effectively getting anything good done - ineffective good, effective bad, sure, but -"

"Yep. So - maybe that's all there is to it and they're all safe enough to be around. Or maybe that's not it and it's something they haven't found. They want some babies from evil Arda to run controlled experiments on but this suggestion was bounced back to them as 'sounds awfully evil'."

"...does it? I mean, presuming the experiments are humane. I realize in most worlds babies come into existence with people who'd object to their removal about but maybe there are orphans."

"There are not that many orphans, and lots of people want to adopt babies for non-controlled-experiment purposes on most planets. Don't know if it's true on evil Arda. He might himself be conducting unethical experiments, if I were evil I hope I'd at least do that instead of just getting a boyfriend -"

"Such a waste of a perfectly good evil otherwise?"

"I apologize if I'm being excessively flippant about it but any space he's occupying in my brain he's not worth. And yep. It is weird to me that an evil me wouldn't do anything interesting."

"I can tolerate flippancy," Kib says. "Any details on the terrible Vala therapy? What did they therapize?"

"They were distressed to have their population going around being violent and generally horrible, they tried to change peoples' inclination to be that."

"What I've heard about their ability to fuck with people's sexualities suggests that it's merely intrinsically horrifying, not - unsurgical. Were they unsurgical about de-horribleing people?"

"I think it was a harder problem? They can turn off 'rebelliousness' or 'lawbreaking' if they like, harder to install a conscience."

"...and that only helps if whoever they'd be not-rebellious-against and whatever laws they'd be following are decent... so if they do a lot of those in particular they wind up with really malleable people and meanwhile anybody smart who likes how their mind works can get around it the same way Midnight did... and anyone who makes one wrong move trying to correct the lurch of society towards increasing horribleness looks rebellious and lawbreaking... yeah I could see this snowballing..."

"Problem is that Beleriand's natives are also awful. That might all be Melian but it's harder to trace exactly how it would have occurred."