"Access to a lot of the fancy stuff is pretty high-trust because if the wrong people get it we have problems like teleporting loyalist Yeerks, but if you just want to know about it I can tell you without further vetting."

"Oh, yeah, I wasn't expecting handouts, just information."

So Elspeth explains things! She's good at that! Crystal balls and computers and adjacency and wishes and the Tesseract and Materia and Earths and Ardas -

"Wait what?"

"Ardas? There's a lot of them. We think one of them ran away with the Yeerks, actually, but it's much less of a problem than the Yeerks themselves. Have you seen anybody from it?"

"My husband is from an Arda, he is not in any way connected to the Yeerk invasion, Arda is the reason why I have a god-killing power, do you have any Melkors in need of killing?"

"Not in known locations. There's one that ran away from the same Arda that disappeared with the Yeerks, but we don't know where he went and unlike Yeerks he's not safe to follow by tracking power. Especially since he may be in Materia or one of its accessory dimensions."

"Right, well, if you dig up any more please let me know immediately, unless you have a preexisting way to trivially swat them."

"Only in some neighborhoods. Our only portable solution isn't trivial."

"And I can hold the continent together afterward, too."

"Oh, our portable solution doesn't do that part at all, that's great."

"I'm very convenient!"

And according to his soul, he is also clever, charismatic, wise, resilient, insightful, loyal, determined, competitive, and married. His soul is very forthcoming about these things. If his soul can be believed, it makes for a pretty excellent recommendation.

"What year is your Arda in and when did you meet it? Is it a Flat Arda?"

"401, I met it about a year ago, and are there nonflat ones? What are the kinds of Ardas?"

"There's one nonflat one, where Valinor was a spherical planet and Endorë a different spherical planet and instead of Trees it had actual suns and everything is higher-tech. And there's an evil one where the Ainur are worse than usual and this had cascade effects on the population; that's the one that ran off with the Yeerks. I should fix your Valar as long as I'm nearby, it turns out that if incarnates are explained to them really thoroughly they become much less terrible at everything."

"What do they get less terrible at? Because the Valar have some weird priorities and I'm not sure I want them more effective at pursuing those," says Taliar.

"Oh, the Halls become less unpleasant to be in and easier to talk people out of and they become able to understand problems people are having in terms more complicated than 'people are sad' and respond more sensitively to those and they become easier to reason with even for people who aren't me and they develop some concept of incentives. I don't make them more homophobic or anything. I don't make them that much less either, since Eru did actually tell them things and that's one of them and we are pretty sure his deficit is not a matter of not understanding what he's doing in the first place, but they get less disproportionate about it and learn to distinguish between 'stay dead or do this thing' and 'actual consent'."

"Hmm. I'll ask my husband what he thinks," he says.

Da needs to come back from Independence with an answer about whether or not we can mention that we know them. It's getting to the point where it'll be really awkward to keep concealing our knowledge with true but misleading statements.

Are they looking trigger happy? If not, just go ahead.

They aren't looking trigger-happy at all. But if I were them I wouldn't necessarily give Honesty Girl all relevant information. Hmm. My instinct is that she's representing their position accurately, but there's that power of hers potentially interfering...

"You're clear to talk to my Emperor, by the way, and it might be simpler to include him in the conversation," he says to Elspeth.

"Sure. Where is he?"

"I'll take you there," says Nezhefena.

Now they are in Esarkan's office.

Esarkan has been receiving regular updates from Dawn-shining Taliar on all this fascinating new information.

"Hello," he says, looking up from his desk. "What is the stance of your organization with respect to the Arda that ran away with the Yeerks?"

"Its nickname is Shadow to distinguish it from all the other Ardas," she says helpfully. "It's not actually worse than most planets, it's just much worse than most Ardas in terms of people being antisocial, which isn't really the inhabitants' fault as such but most of them were not directly mind-controlled, just made worse people than they would have been indirectly, so there's no obvious way to act on it not being their fault. At least we're pretty sure now they're not contagious. Shadow really upsets regular Maitimos, who are heavily represented in peal affairs and don't like their Shadow alt 'Midnight' or having to think about him. And there are enough other planets-full-of-mediocre-populations-we-can't-trust-with-heavy-duty-stuff-but-do-want-to-help that it hasn't come to a point where the obvious next priority if not for that would be doing anything much with Shadow. So the strategy lately has been lightly supervised neglect because all the palatable non-neglect options keep turning out to be terrible ideas. Except then it skipped off with a bunch of Imperial loyalist Yeerks and that's a really big deal and we need to find all of those Yeerks."

"All of those Yeerks are dead and their infrastructure destroyed; the Yeerk daeva children are in the care of the Arda in question, which is known to me as Independence," says Esarkan. "Apart from the Yeerk invasion, which I understand was not under their control, they have been impeccably good neighbours. And it would be relevant to tell Dawn-shining Taliar how your explanations affected their Valar in particular."