"They do vary in quality. Like, Mandos sucks, but Aulë's sort of chill, Ulmo has ever been useful in his life..."

"Well, they weren't particularly differentiating themselves from one another when they told me they were sending me away and I asked if I could have time to pack before going to the Outer Lands and they said no they meant back to Materia and I said I would die and begged for my life and they sent me anyway."

"Fuck. Okay, uh, Golden's kid is capable of turning Valar into something more approximating people, if you were in the market for an apology there may yet be hope."

"Will they stop being stupid and evil because they are stupid and evil."

"They get much less stupid after Elspeth's through with them but by the time she does that how evil they are is rarely a matter for concern anymore because we can just ignore them if we want!"

"That's what we've been doing, but it'd be nice to have Maiar for mana!"

"There's a couple accessible Maiar and Elspeth can probably interest more of them in a How To Not Be So Stupid lecture if there's a reason to want access to more of them."

"Olórin?"

"Haven't met any of those. The particularly convenient ones are named Huan."

"They should all work but Olórin was cool."

"What does Elspeth do exactly?"

"Valar and Maiar are really impaired at understanding incarnates, but Elspeth has a magic power summarized as 'telling the truth' - except she can do it really quickly and densely and with lots of nested context, and if she turns it way up, the Valar will actually understand her instead of sort of trying to pretend."

"That sounds tremendously valuable."

"Elspeth's great. Okay, so, the Valar sucked directly at you instead of sucking quietly in the background, and...?"

"Well. I didn't die. I'm not sure if they successfully protected me somehow or if Materia is just okay with people who don't do science while they're in it - suspect the latter, wouldn't count on it - went back to college, got my degree and my license and joined a practice and made sure I had language books around to distract Fëanáro if he tried to rescue me... which he did... successfully."

"And then I took Bella to somewhere in the south of Valinor where the Valar don't pay much attention and I got Rúmil and we figured out how to parameterize my interdimensional teleport for some place with lots of science and no gods, and we ended up on a planet in Warp and on the news there was a story about T'Mir and she looked like Bella so I went to rescue her from prison only she wanted an explanation so instead I came and told Bella and then we rescued her and then went to a planet that wasn't in the Federation."

"I was in for violation of the Prime Directive," chirps T'Mir, at Cam's questioning look. "I'm very proud of myself."

"Well, congratulations on violating the Prime Directive, then. Okay. We can double back and cover all the non-Ardas after we're through the timeline. So, next chronologically is Kib. 1444. Uh... sans Boots, Miriel is not alive at this point, I don't seem to have exactly when she dies noted down..."

He hugs Bella very very tightly.

Squeeze.

"...yeah. Uh, and the Valar offer to reembody her and she says no and her husband asks her to come back and she says no and eventually he decides he'd like to remarry, but the Valar say nobody can have two living spouses so if he does that Miriel has to stay dead, and she says, fine, I'll stay dead, and Finwë marries this other lady who does not get along with her stepson at all and has four kids with her who do not get along with their half brother at all."

"She couldn't come back but - still - was I grown up by then, I think if I was grown up I might have been sort of okay..."

"Sixteen as of the remarriage, first half-sister comes along when you are twenty-one."

"The Halls was Finwë thinking."

Bella-clinging.