"Is being horrible to Forever literally the only thing you could think up? You didn't have any non-horrible way to win him back, after -?"

"I assassinated his parents? No. Or - maybe, after a very very long time, but I also still would have had a civil war on my hands if I'd let him just leave, and I certainly couldn't hold him as a political prisoner and also win him back, and I'm not sure you wouldn't find that horrible anyway..."

"And there was nobody handy whose parents you hadn't assassinated, or they wouldn't have done the trick."

"The problem wasn't 'I can't go a few centuries without sex'  and the criteria for what I did need aren't literally 'Findekáno, or nobody else' but people who meet them aren't abundant. Also picking him ended the civil war more thoroughly than anything else I could have done.

From what you've said it sounds like my alts would have known they were setting themselves up for failure and would have just miserably suicidally pushed their way through it until the Enemy put them out of their misery. If that's what goodness is it is unappealing."

"Well, some people have other things on their minds besides what's appealing, but we've established you are not one of those people."

"Nope. But, you know, given a situation where I don't expect to be put through centuries of psychological hell I can be far more flexible about which resources I have in reach, so if we're not expecting the Enemy back I'm happy to act like my alts would."

"I mean, that's... better than not... but is not exactly a foundation for solid interpersonal trust, you know?"

"I'm sorry I hurt him. I regret it. I can't do it again and I wish I'd stopped sooner. It doesn't sound like any of you have anything in mind that would create a foundation for solid interpersonal trust, so we may just have to live with 'our template's core traits trade resilience and effectiveness off against moral purity, inherently both sides of that tradeoff think the other side's repulsive and terrible."

"S'pose."

"You are welcome to propose a better solution."

"Haven't got one. I'm not actually sure how we're trading off against your alts' productivity, here - me and mine can in fact just ignore you if we decide that is the best plan, especially now that Forever's out of everybody's reach doing whatever he wants. Not sure yours have this feature."

"They're wasting a lot of time being upset about me?"

"Island is wasting - some, maybe not a lot, not enough that there are obvious tells in political operations but there are confounding factors. I assume Maedhros is comparable, the others might be fine, Iobel hasn't seemed very worried about it."

"Is there anything I could do that would help them there."

"Honestly, I would expect you to know the answer to that better than I would at this point."

"I can think of lots of things that'd make it worse but nothing that'd make it better. No one kidnapped their Findekáno's, right?"

"No one has kidnapped their Findekános. The Space ones have drama and I think maybe some but not all forks are reconciled or something but they remain unkidnapped, Mitros and Finankar were broken up for a while but are back together, the other sets are married."

"And my brothers? They all have brothers?"

"Yes, they all have brothers. Mine has a sister, too, my Fëanáro went to my world and decided to take home a random baby."

"Then they'll be okay. They can outsource the caring about their own wellbeing."

"...lovely."

"I think recommendations from me about how to value their own needs more would be counterproductive."

"Unless you have something unpredictable to say, yep."

"I don't know what the right thing to do would have been."

"I actually sort of wonder what would have happened if you'd given Forever a couple of weeks to process the assassination and then literally explained to him the tradeoff -"