...right, so he couldn't get anything like 'if you release Melkor it'll go fine' or 'it'll be a disaster', since Mandos'd act on that, but 'don't make gems they'll be a disaster' - maybe isn't the sort of message Mandos'd pass on? She doesn't, usually, let people talk to their dead relatives...

Which is its own sort of fucked up, is there an official reason for that?

I don't think so, I think 'they're dead, you're not supposed to make it as identical as possible to being alive' is - some sort of Vala-first-principle that they've never been able to communicate their reasons for believing to anyone?

Bleah.

Yep. Same with the conditions on bringing people back.

Whyyyy do they suuuuuck.

I mean, for aliens I would have said their values are remarkably close to ours, except then we met actual aliens and you're way closer -

Apart from stuff about prettiness and prison and stuff, yeah. And we can, like, explain the differences when they come up.

Tremendously convenient, that.

It is!

Anyhow, the Valar seem to consider it self-evident that being dead should be unlike being alive.

Which would be one thing if they made it different in some pleasanter fashion or were less picky about who got to be alive. Sigh. - Anybody else going to want to talk to dead relatives? How many people even have dead relatives?

Not very many, most people do get reembodied pretty quickly, there are a lot of survivors of Utumno who chose to stay dead and I have no idea if talking to them would be a good idea -

Would it be a bad idea in some obvious way if it were a bad idea -?

I should probably ask Rúmil. It might be bad in some non-obvious way.

I don't know Rúmil.

You'll like her. Advisor of my mother's, was a prisoner in Utumno, invented a sort of pictogram thing before my mother invented a proper alphabet, wrote this famous and very well-researched collection of oral histories of Cuivienen...

That I read, if it's the thing I'm thinking of.

Probably is. Anyway, I'll ask her - I can introduce you if you'd like -

Sure, why not?

Let me ask when she's free.

And a few days later, "Isabella, this is Rúmil - Rúmil, Isabella -"

"Pleased to meet you."

"Pleased to meet you too."

"Isabella figured out she can talk to the dead."

"Congratulations."