"Apparently it was concerning Zenith, but she's not sure if bringing it up with a Vala will trigger something or offend him or what."

"...bring it up in Luster, reset if she spurs on the apocalypse by accident? I know Gem doesn't want to reset lightly but 'will the omnipotent deity who likes high tragedy start tinkering' seems worth chancing it over."

"Seems optimistic to assume time travel will faze him, but yeah."

"Right, fair enough."

"And Loki can do that too anyway, she describes the time stone as 'uncomfortable but not painful' - the Tesseract is 'painful but not uncomfortable' and the Aether is both, apparently -"

"And the Tesseract's still too moody about adjacency to give us opinions on whether anyone else can work the other stones?"

"Yeah. It's old as fuck, it might have moods that last centuries. Loki's guess is that the stones like to be - redundant, to an extent? So if we needed an emergency mind stone wielder Boots'd be the best bet, say."

"Huh. Okay."

"And Gem could probably handle time likewise, but since Loki can do that one, that'd only come up if we needed to do something very fancy with time that requires more cooperation from the rock to pull off."

"Makes sense." Sigh. 

"Stupid rocks."

"Slightly better than the Valar at not being a total waste of your unthinkable power!"

"In a way, I guess. The rocks are doing 'we are inanimate objects usable as tools which happen to be temperamental and sapient', which is at least very different from 'we are deities divinely charged to fuck up Eru's crap instructions and be very self-righteous about that'."

"Oh, it's an infinitely less annoying way of squandering nigh-omnipotence."

"Very much so. You could even sort of credit the Tesseract with the salvage of Elentári, considering."

"It sent Loki through, right?"

"Yes. I mean, it did this because it thought she was being boring, but yes."

Sigh. "I could ask Boots to fix my existential terror of it somehow happening again but I'm not sure that's a good idea."

"Yeah."

Hugs. "Love you both. Sorry I - sorry mes in general - the things I put you through -"

"It's definitely a trend." Kiss.

"We love you anyway." Kiss.

And after Kib goes home he writes Boots with days it would be a bad idea for Kib to be incapacitated and what are you going to do to him, if you don't mind.

Considering the purpose he has in mind for it I was thinking kind of a pileup of stuff. The only time I remember anybody at school actually doing something like this as a prank it was alexia, which would really freak him out, so I'm not going to directly copy that, but maybe color agnosia and dyscalculia and hemisphere neglect?

You're terrifying. Thanks for letting us know.

And thanks for all your effort in the new Arda.