"What has he told you?"

"I'd hesitate to pass on his summary in case he'd prefer I kept it to myself," he says. "If you're interested in explaining the other side, perhaps you could start from the beginning."

"I'm not sure where to start or how much context you already have; there's a considerable amount of peal history accumulated by now and about half of it is at least loosely relevant."

"I've heard that there are other Maitimos from nicer Ardas where Elves are naturally the sort of people the Valar are comfortable with so the Valar don't use nonconsensual mental alteration to make them that way," he says, "and that they're very upset about Midnight not being cast in the same mold."

"The problem, so far as we are aware, has nothing to do with the innate nature of the relevant Elves and instead has to do with worse Valar, most specifically a subtler Enemy," says T'Mir. "The divergence in the Maitimo template in particular we are inclined to trace through his father to a person named Rúmil, who in all Ardas is an ex-prisoner of Utumno and has considerable influence over Fëanáro's default-badly-parented upbringing. To Boots's subtle artistry, which can normally detect alts, the Independence Rúmil does not even register as a member of the template. Standard Arda Valar who Elspeth has not visited do perform dubiously consensual mental alteration on dead Elves but do not practice such thorough surveillance on the inclinations of the living. Complicating the matter is that in a typical Arda's trajectory Maitimos are captured early in the war and spend time in Angband and have some lingering difficulty with coping with the concept of Midnight's behavior towards his Findekáno for that reason. There are non-traumatized Maitimos - the Space Arda versions are forked from a time prior to that event; the human alt is not from an Arda at all - but they remain upset about having an alt who kept and raped a prisoner under variously mind-altering oaths for centuries."

"It's an upsetting thing," he says, "and I'm not saying it isn't, I just - "

He pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts.

"...When I look at this situation, what I want to do is find some way to help all the rest of you, improve your lives and the lives of your people to such an overwhelming extent that it becomes worth it that you met him. That's - I guess you'd say my template - that's my template's favoured approach to conflict. Just keep making everyone involved better off until it goes away."

"I think that would have been easier to accomplish before Midnight ran off with Imperial Loyalist Yeerks and his entire planet. Teleporting planets, even Flat Ardas, had not previously been tested; that could have killed everyone aboard and he didn't even bring the Valar as a safety. Yeerks are intensely dangerous to unprepared populations and according to our limited understanding of what happened after Nuime was found this fact was made manifest there, if mercifully briefly."

"...Do you know that he didn't test it?" he wonders.

"With what safely uninhabited Flat Arda? They don't work like spherical planets."

"'Even Flat Ardas' made it sound like you consider Flat Ardas strictly safer to teleport. But that's a little beside the point. I think everyone involved in this situation is incredibly lucky that Independence fetched up next to Nuime because now your major point of contact with the Ardas you dislike is going to be me and my alt. Please let us help you."

"Flat Ardas lack one known danger associated with teleporting spherical planets - their suns are closer by and manually piloted. However, it would be unlikely for a spherical planet to suddenly crumple in the absence of its magical physics, as spherical planets do not require such a thing. How is it you propose to help us?"

"Do you have any problems that could be solved with vast amounts of arbitrary magical power? You could start by telling Elaneth-imire about those. But what I was specifically talking about was trying to straighten out your approach to Independence. It's... I might have to tell you some of my world's history to explain why I'm coming at it from this perspective, but: when you make people desperate, they do desperate things. I think Midnight's situation might have made you all a little desperate, and then you reacted in a way that made him desperate in turn, and in Nuime we have learned that when powerful people get trapped in that cycle with each other, everyone suffers."

"We've been told that Elaneth-imire has a portable continent-preserving means of killing Melkors, which we should assume we'll need sooner or later. Certainly we are not under the impression that we ever handled Midnight well as a collective; the entire business has been governed by unproductive emotional reactions, which is why I am the instance of my template having this conversation with you now. I am entirely willing to hear the history of Nuime."

"More precisely, what Elaneth-imire has is a soul artifact a thousand times more powerful than anyone else's, which picks up new powers depending on his needs, with a lead time of three days," he says. "Soul artifacts are Nuime's local magic system. Anyone in Nuime can become a soulbearer, in theory. In practice it can be difficult, and it used to be much more so. A few thousand years ago, soulbearers were very rare because the process for becoming one wasn't common knowledge. Then someone decided that wasn't fair, and everyone should be able to have that kind of power, so he published an explanation. I actually think it might've turned out okay if he hadn't picked such a bad time and place, but as it happens, well..."

He shakes his head.

"His country was at war with its neighbour, had been for a long time. While the news of how to manifest your soul was still spreading, they put together an army of soulbearers and attacked. The neighbour was in danger of getting wiped out completely, so they got their hands on the secret and put together their own army of soulbearers. The thing about armies of soulbearers fighting each other is that both sides have enormous amounts of power but there's no way to predict anything about what that power is going to look like unless you personally know every single soulbearer involved. And even then, souls can change. It makes war very very messy and unpredictable. So what ended up happening is that both sides were terrified of being completely exterminated and thought the only way to save themselves was to exterminate the other side first. In the end, they both lost. That was the first Soul War."

A thoughtful, withdrawn look crosses his face for a moment; then he focuses on T'Mir again and continues.

"For a while, everyone agreed that armies of soulbearers just weren't worth the risk. But eventually someone decided they wanted to completely wipe out one of their neighbours; they put together an army of soulbearers and counted on everyone else's reluctance to start another Soul War to prevent them from doing the same and fighting back. They destroyed their neighbour so thoroughly that the only survivors were refugees in other nearby countries, then started conquering those places to get the refugees. Some of them fielded soulbearer armies of their own; others tried to kill or capture any refugees in their midst so the aggressors would leave them alone, and then ended up fighting the refugees, most of whom were soulbearers themselves by that point, and the whole mess just kept getting bigger until it swallowed up the world. The Soul Wars didn't so much end as gradually taper off once there wasn't enough of any individual side left to present a credible threat of total destruction to anyone else."

He considers for a moment whether it's relevant to add—

"My father was born during the Soul Wars. He saw it happen, some of it. Nuime is safe from that kind of thing now, especially since Elaneth-imire is irrevocably immortal, but it strikes me that open conflict between dimension-spanning polities would turn out similarly, and I cannot overstate how much I don't want that to happen. When I hear about how you handled him, I can't help thinking that it's sort of like that very first country in the very early days, secure in the knowledge that their neighbour didn't have a soulbearer army. It's - I don't blame you, I want to be clear about that. I know it's a hard problem and I can't say that the way I would've handled it in your place is unambiguously better. But I think the strategy of trying to restrict Independence's power is deeply counterproductive. If you'd been on good terms with them when the Yeerks showed up, if they'd had more resources and been able to trust you more, maybe they would've had better options than cooperating. I don't imagine that the Yeerks would have politely turned around and gone home if Midnight had refused to help them."

Sigh.

"So. I don't think anyone in this situation wants there to be conflict between you and Independence. I think everyone would be better off if both sides could trust each other and share resources freely. And I really, really want to make that happen, because you all sound like good people trying to do the best you can with a bad situation, and I want only good things for you, but I also care about Midnight and his country and want them to prosper. And Nuime is caught in the middle here and would really prefer if everyone got along. By the way, if you want to give things to Nuime that you don't want Dawn or Independence to have access to, I'm able to make commitments about that on Esarkan's behalf. But I am really hoping to secure your permission to give Dawn and Independence some things as well. I can't think how it could possibly hurt you if Independence had the Internet."

"No, the Internet is fine. What concerns us more are daeva especially demons, Materian wizardry especially in the presence of Maiar, the sorcery underlying the teleport especially in the presence of an untrusted instance of Fëanáro - Midnight's Fëanáro has been working with his Space alts and not interacting with Bells at all lest we irritate him; this is open to Dawn's too - worldleapers, and spellbinding."

"Well," he says. "What about those things concerns you?"

"Demons can produce adjacency-unlimited surveillance on any unsecured or inadequately secured recorded information, which is most forms of recorded information not specifically produced with demons in mind; they can in a moment destroy stars and planets; they are themselves indestructible. While demons as a group have humanlike psychology, this includes a humanlike amount of variance and much of the peaceability of Hell has to do with the fact that everyone in it has the same powers. We're keeping an eye on the demon who made the worldleapers for Midnight and so far she hasn't made a move to distribute the information or leave Hell, but that's sheer luck. We have been trying for years to come up with a solution to the demonic information security problem which doesn't involve trying to bottleneck Hell's information, but so far do not have one. Materian wizardry is extremely powerful in its original dimension, which forbids systematic experimentation; outside of that the limit its eventual capabilities are unknown but presumably enormous. Maiar have unlimited fuel of the sort it uses and their cooperation removes a soft cap on development and casting. The sorcery underlying the teleport is slow to develop but has no known hard limits - additionally, the inventor of the teleport, my alt Loki, is very personally annoyed that it has been stolen - and may or may not be possible to reverse-engineer. Worldleapers provide dangerous but not prohibitively dangerous access to new worlds whose magic systems may be as or more potentially dangerous than the above. Spellbinding is not known to have any genuinely hard power caps when it is combined with Arda magic."

"I fully agree that demons require careful handling, and I wouldn't dream of treating them otherwise. The rest... what do you imagine will happen if Dawn and Independence gain access to powerfully general magic systems? Or is it as simple as - you don't trust them, therefore you don't want them to have significant power? Well, Dawn has Elaneth-imire. He's pretty significant all by himself."

"Yes, that's concerning too," T'Mir says. "We were not making a substantial priority of restricting Independence's independent work before - they had an ordinary crystal ball, although I don't think they ever did pick at it very much - we just weren't helping. Then Midnight risked an entire planet many of whose inhabitants are not even his own subjects in an unprecedented planetary teleport, stranded the subtle artists we'd loaned him on an undeveloped part of Vanda Nossëo, assisted Imperial loyalist Yeerks, and apparently secured the friendship of a world with yet another high-power magic system."

"...I think this situation would benefit from more guarantees of trust," he says. "Is there anyone you trust who is a Yeerk or could morph one, who could go in my head to verify that I'm - the person that I and my soul say I am? I want to have this conversation without worrying that you're going to think I'm wrong or lying or playing games with you when I'm not."

"My alt Butterfly can morph a Yeerk. So could I, I suppose, but she's the one who's done it before. There will remain the salient possibility that you're subject to some manner of deception or manipulation, and again as a group we do store most of our social skills which would make that clear in the Maitimos."

"If you're low on social skills, you're more than welcome to borrow mine," he says. "I'm pretty hard to deceive."

"How so?"

"I find it easy to understand people, and my soul has a lie detection power, and in extreme cases it's been known to just tell me what someone was trying to keep from me," he says. "And if I understand right, going in my head actually would let you pick up my social skills?"

"To an extent. Butterfly does not experience morph instincts the way most people do and it seems likely that others of us would have the same property. She would get your languages but has not mentioned retaining much else from people she's previously Yeerked. Social skills are also the sort of thing that is often heavily entwined with the personality attempting to deploy them. Lie detection alone does not necessarily guarantee anything; we do have that in magic song form. Depending on how extreme cases are defined the other power may or may not be any more reliable than Elspeth's occasional bursts of sourceless truth."