"Is that all you wanted to know?"

"When did it happen?"

"Right when you got in the sharper sphere of my weird sense."

"Fantastic. Am I going to make it worse if I'm sometimes up for interacting and sometimes not, compared to if we just - avoid each other all the time -"

"Sometimes is fine."

"'Fine'?"

"...and better than nothing? It's - sort of hard to map regular words onto things that are about how my brain reacts to you-related stuff..."

"That sounds kind of horrible, is it kind of horrible?"

"...it is very intense? It is not uniformly horrible."

"What would you-before-it-happened want people to do for you-once-it-happened -"

"...I'm stuck like this, there's no removing actual artifact effects the way I can remove ones I give out. I don't think I would have wanted to stand very much on any particular principles that would feel inconvenient after the fact, given that. Pre-Van-Accident-Annie isn't going to turn up and wonder what I've been doing with her stuff."

"The Valar - object to people being gay, among other things. They'll correct it for you if they find out. I - thought a lot about what I preferred if that happened to me and it wasn't 'go forth and be straight.' But. If you don't want to search universes for a way, using our admittedly kind of terrible mechanism to do that, and you don't think you would have wanted that..."

"If a way to undo it comes up I'll take it but that's actually only because it bothers you."

"You don't - prefer not to be in love with a mass murderer who can't handle being touched and thinks you're a malicious hallucination even independent of whether I like it?"

"I don't know what removing it would look like. I don't know what it would do to me, I don't know if I'd be able to contextualize my memories or recalibrate my emotional intensity scale into something useful or ever fall in love again or - maybe I'd do it even if leaving it didn't bother you if I knew exactly what would happen and it was all okay, but I really don't like mind control and adding more of it solves a different problem from the one I actually have."

"...fair enough - recalibrate your emotional intensity scale? So, everything's just much stronger -"

"Not everything, but some things and I've gotten surprisingly good at shuffling around which things."

"How does it interact with - presumably you'd be horrified by us if it wasn't in place making you like me -"

"Well, it doesn't make me like Lírnith and I do anyway."

"That's actually quite helpful, thank you."

"You're welcome."

"If we could do something about the evil god, what does a good outcome look like for you? How can you be happy?"

"...that's not something I can answer independently of knowing what you want."

"Um. Pretending that the evil god dies and everything, I would move our people south and - take a couple centuries to put myself back together and then go figure out what we could do to help humans build stable states? They have much more trouble with it than Elves do, because their leaders keep dying and half the time there's a horrible war when they do. You're - you're going to die even without Melkor helping..."

"...yeah, humans die. Democracies tend not to have succession wars, you could try that."