"...I'm not sure if you just find it relaxing to vent about that or if you think you're accomplishing something or if this is a genuine expression of confusion on some level or what."

"I am very confused by you and what you actually want and I find it very annoying to be called 'the evil Maitimo' by people who want to casually kill a couple thousand civilians every year through neglect and mismanagement because it bothers them that -

- if I'd just killed Findekáno none of you would have even the slightest hesitations about adding me to your merry galaxy-traipsing band of self-righteous troublemakers -"

"Well, it would have been harder to notice you'd done that. We almost missed the actual problem. - I realize you're kind of operating on a limited number of models of non-evil people here but I'm still really puzzled by how much trouble you're having modeling us."

"Do you want to tell me about what you and your alts do with your lives when it's not 'show up, scare the Enemy into going off to torture people when he'd stopped, glow blue, hear rumors from the Valar, and then obsessively supervise me and my boyfriend for twenty minutes of panicking to make sure we don't get a kiss in before they kidnap him for his own good, then lament that they can't murder me on the spot because the country'd fall apart, give me a decade to change that, leave, do not communicate at all for several years?'

Because I can tell, for example, what kind of people you'll get along with conversationally, but no, I don't have the faintest idea what motivates people who act like that."

"...have you not heard the explanation for scaring the Enemy off?"

"I heard it. I don't blame them for that, but the Enemy being free and torturing people is upsetting to me and contributes to my general profoundly-unimpressed impression of you and your friends."

"I do keep saying 'we' but for whatever it's worth I was not one of the gang at the time your world was found. People've probably hesitated to give you any information they don't directly want you to act on right then since my template kind of models yours as being just about psychic, Bells are not so much people persons - I imagine that since you're not literally psychic this is frustrating. I could tell you the story of my life but it'd involve a lot of filling in mostly irrelevant background about my world and gushing about my husband and stuff, I don't actually know what you need to know to form a more well-rounded impression."

"We're not psychic. I know people well because I've known them for a long time, I have lots of reference points for most people and understand them very well, I generally like everyone I meet, I cannot look at someone and see what stories they tell themselves to sleep at night and I find myself unusually unmotivated to try given, you know, the circumstances under which we met. I'd like to hear about your husband. Tell me about your husband."

"His name's Aydanci. He and I are both reincarnated which is a rare unexplained phenomenon in my world, Stork; in our first lives, I was a girl, which matters not a bit on Stork, but came in handy when we wanted to be openly married in Valinor. He's brilliant - he and my Arda's Fëanáro came up with what eventually managed to kill our Enemy, I was pretty much out of commission at the time - before that his specialty was golems, like this one but smaller and less complicated," he aims a thumb at Charp, "specialized to deal with diseases and so on in our home world. My first incarnation died of a particularly nasty disease. It is gone now. That was him. He is the only person I've ever heard of with a rational sexual orientation; as soon as I had enough of my first life's memories dreamed back into place to know where to find him I turned up on his doorstep and he took it astonishingly well. Enemy murdered him in Valinor. Found his reincarnation, my you found him some nice Elves to raise him back up to adulthood, I waited, he got his dreams..."

He's nodding slowly. 

"And eventually we resumed being happily married, again, and then the Enemy got me and I was at least according to the conceit of where I find myself now rescued and thereafter passively catatonic for some time and he demonstrated his bottomless willingness to kill things that hurt me whether they are poxes or evil deities. And then my alts showed up and dragged me out of catatonia and I'm trying to be a very good husband because he has been very long-suffering indeed."

"It sounds it. Where does hopping over to talk to the evil Maitimo fit in?"

"Island doesn't think I'll make anything worse and I think not stopping by occasionally to see what's going on seems like a bad plan and our current lack of plan seems like a worse one."

"Do you want me to swear I've been working on transitioning the kingdom to a parliamentary democracy as described and for the reasons described and haven't done much else that I would understand to upset you."

"I didn't come here with a list of things I wanted you to swear. I mean, you can if you like, I suppose, but I'm starting to think that your understanding of what would upset me or us is not so great and that this may be significant to the whole Why Is This Arda Evil problem."

"I'm starting to get a better picture. By 'evil' - can you break down the differences between this world and the ones you're considering the standard, non-specific to me -"

"History of a standard Flat Arda up to Loki's insertion point - I showed up earlier than she did - is - let's see, do I have this in writing -"

He digs up history notes on his computer (thank you Cam's demonic habit of making sure everything is written down at least once even with an eidetic memory) and presents what he's got on Elentári history.

"Huh. Okay. Yeah, differences start at least as early as that early Elven history by Cuivienen looks a lot like early human history - tribes would raid each other, there were cities built and sacked and burned to the ground and kill-all-the-men-and-married-women -"

"...my world doesn't have that particular convention but yeah, a lot of the dissonance is that we expect adorable innocuousness from Elves that we don't expect from humans or random Edda aliens."

"This world's not adorably innocuous, no. If you modelled it as a human civilization you might come closer, there's no difference between human and Elven crime rates within my kingdom adjusting for age and I don't think the differences elsewhere are intrinsic. How would you treat this world if it was full of random Edda aliens?"

"Depends, is it full of alts? The other part of the dissonance is that this place breaks the inferences we expect to be able to make about alts. You have a human alt. He's just human, not evil."

"I would really like to contest the characterization that I'm evil."

"Okay, he's just human, not a rapist."

"So everyone's upset because you had this really fast avenue to high social trust and now it's broken."

"Kinda, that and you're automatically salient for template membership reasons - so're Findekános - and we can't just write you off as yet another place with problems that we should get around to when it comes up in alphabetical order or we have an especially good angle on it, you are hard to ignore."