"Thanks. I feel silly for not having tried it sooner, it's not the first thing I can do that osanwë doesn't."

"Oh, what else, aside from the range?"

"Interdimensionality. I did have to learn that specifically but it didn't take long from where I started."

"It's excellent that you can do the dead. Mandos might be able to change that if it came to her awareness."

"I had no plans to inform her, although it might be optimistic to assume she'll never notice."

"I doubt she'd do more than change it. Or explain to you why it's important you don't do that, I suppose."

"The explanation might be interesting."

"It's a notorious limitation of the Valar, explanations."

"I've noticed that."

"We were wondering if it was a good idea to reach out to people who've chosen to stay dead -"

"No."

"Okay.

You heard, presumably, that they're considering letting Melkor out on a leash -"

"I did. I was asked to comment quite a lot - I don't have any more information than you do -"

"What were your comments, may I ask?"

"I think Melkor has the best model of Elves of any of the Valar, and am not confident that were she lying we'd be able to tell. I don't know if changing her mind or regretting what she did is in character, I didn't get much of a sense of her personal character. Utumno was sufficiently worse-than-people-are-imagining that I decided a long time ago it was not helpful for accurate information to be widely circulated. I'm not sure if I regret that, now, it might change peoples' assumptions - the Valar know but their models of Elves are too compromised to understand -"

"- something about Melkor having a better model of Elves than the other Valar seems important but I'm not quite sure how -"

"Well, there's the question of why but - they're all supposed to sort of harmonize, maybe Melkor was supposed to be the one who understood incarnates."

"And the one who'd put that information to the most malicious use."

"Utumno had a time dilation effect, prisoners spent most of their time hallucinating - when they weren't being tortured - that it was over, that we'd been rescued, or escaped, or persuaded her we were loyal. Stretched out decades, sometimes, internally consistent scenarios where you were safe, then you'd wake up. You shouldn't contact the dead because they'll just assume it's another game."

"...okay. I'm glad we asked you, then. Mandos doesn't have any particular ability to convince them otherwise -?"

"Mandos can't do anything Melkor can't. You might be able to, actually, because you probably can do things a Vala can't, but - they're dead because they want to be done having unexpected things happen that are just the setup for another game, I don't think you'd get consent for psionics-to-prove-that-Melkor's-even-scarier-than-they-realized and that's how it'd be taken -"

"The only obvious thing I can do right now that I'm not aware of Valar being able to do, or at least not being in the habit of doing, is handing out eidetic memory - my telepathy's not that phenomenologically different from osanwë and if they don't know for sure they're in the Halls being reachable there won't be a distinguishing feature - surely if Melkor still had them their consent would be irrelevant?"

"I was thinking the precognition. And yes, of course, but - the point of the fake rescues, I think, trying to reconstruct it, is to render people a constant source of pain to everyone they care about if they're actually rescued or freed - she sometimes did free people - and those people might care about consent, so you'll frequently end up in a scenario where it's respected..."

"Ah. - fact that I'd be a total stranger wouldn't help? It's actually sort of difficult to demonstrate precognition in a conversation with no context, takes a lot of doing to establish a loop where making a prediction doesn't result in something else happening instead."

"If you were a total stranger and didn't have certain specific personality traits for long enough I might start to give that some weight. You can't, say, guess what I'm about to say and write it down?"