"I'm curious if it works on orcs' chronic pain problem. Currently we're taking a minor security risk teaching orcs a healing spell that does it. - Oh, we would like to collect Dawn's orcs, if Dawn doesn't object, and put them on one of the orc planets."

"I'll pass that along. Elaneth-imire would be delighted. They're all dead at the moment, but he can resurrect them himself if it would be inconvenient for you. And I would be more than happy to heal orcs. Elaneth-imire didn't find out for sure, but we think the healing aura does work on them."

"We usually don't have much trouble getting Mandoses to produce them but have no objection to routing around him either."

"None of me has ever actually spoken to a Vala as far as I know, so I have very little information on how easy they are to convince to do things."

"It depends on the things. Discharging orcs to be removed from his custody, given free will, and offered a nice place to live was doable even before Elspeth began offering reasonable-Valar-as-a-service."

"I'm very impressed with Elspeth from what I saw of her in Elaneth-imire's memories! Okay, so healing orcs is one thing, what else do you think you can use me for? I can also acquire powers aimed at solving arbitrary problems on three days' notice."

"The Shadow Melkor ran off into the multiverse while we were checking for a deadman switch, which one Sauron was known to have. Do you have anything for that?"

"...If you want it solved fast, give me three days to become immortal and then send me and Elaneth-imire, with Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena for tracking and transport. If you want it solved with certainty, wait for Raika-seren to get up to Elaneth-imire's level and then send both of them. Raika-seren will have the most personal investment, and that matters with souls. Sending two sun-bright Taliars is enormous overkill but at the point where you've got a loose Melkor roaming the multiverse, enormous overkill is warranted. There's no telling when Raika-seren will get that powerful, though, it could be a while."

"We are concerned he may have run to Materia or one of the accessory worlds thereof, which do not obey lawful causality and instead favor certain classes of entities; Valar likely count as one of those."

"Then I think you want certainty."

"My point was more that certainty isn't when it comes to Materia, but Elaneth-imire may qualify as another Materia-protected category for already having killed one Melkor."

"Yeah - my logic was that if certainty might not be certain, you definitely want it - but if killing gods is a qualifier, I think they'll do fine. Maybe let Raika-seren take out the next available Melkor first if the timing on his power level works out right."

"They don't arrive on a particularly predictable schedule and we did recently check for Ardas adjacent to the explored map and found none, but yes, that would probably help."

"We'll see. No other tricky problems hanging around that might submit to a medium-sized amount of arbitrary magic?"

"We'd also be very interested if you can directly affect adjacency, render things unconjurable by demons, resurrect people who in life had spirit animals or familiars, produce divinatory information about certain properties of some unusual worlds without us having to test them, duplicate certain spellbinder effects or make them more efficient to cast..."

"I can see what my soul comes up with - might help if I heard about specific applications for these various abilities, resurrection's obvious but what are the unusual worlds, what kind of spellbinder effects do you want duplicated or streamlined... soul artifacts can't traditionally maintain magical effects on anything without a constant investment of power, but I'm pretty sure that if anyone can sneak past that restriction it's me."

"Stork's native human population does not reproduce and instead babies appear in random wilderness locations; we don't know if the rate will change with the population or anything else. Materia's anticausality may be inherently unpredictable but so far it seems not to react to things occurring outside its sphere, and if observed from there it might be we could learn more. One of the most commonly used high-investment spellbinder results is duplicating daeva indestructibility."

"...Randomly appearing wilderness babies sound - bad. D'you have a solution to that part already?"

"The eponymous stork golems collect them and bring them to creches."

"Oh, okay, good. Then yeah, I'll think about all those and see what my soul turns up in three days."

"Thank you."

"Happy to help."

And he is fully informed and would like to talk with the peal about Dawn and handling of future evil Ardas!

"So it sounds like it might be useful to disentangle Dawn and Independence here, you have a lot of grievances with Independence that you don't have with Dawn."

"Yes, that's true."

"Dawn is a responsibly run polity with superpowers that they can loan you - it sounds like you still have people dying of old age on some worlds known to you, Dawn-shining's planet-spanning healing aura could probably cover several hundred worlds in a week, and it de-ages people -"