"How long would lie detection take you, it'd be really useful -"

"Something like six or seven years for a basic version, and that's really quite basic, I strongly considered it but most people who pick it up early in their careers find it's not all it's cracked up to be."

"And I don't suppose we can hire one for a conversation that isn't happening anyway."

"Yeah, not really."

"Okay. We can both think on it, revisit when we've got more ideas - I've got the expedition to Endorë to plan -"

"Yeah, she's not going anywhere this week at least."

So: planning. They want to get a sense of what happens if they contact both the Elves and the orcs, they want to get a clearer view - they can leave someone stationed in the ocean to bounce observations from Endorë to the precog in great detail, which will work better than remote viewing -

- and she makes a list of questions for Melkor, namely why-that-way-of-trying-to-defy-the-plan and whether she can help the other Valar understand incarnates any and how orcs were made and what exactly they're sworn to do.

Which Isabella doesn't-really ask, in various orders -

[I tried every way of shaking off fate that I could think of, some of them more palatable - taught orcs everything I could see of the future and instructed them to prevent wars and slavery, and to ensure their own continued existence as a people, and to warn every society they came into contact with of the power of the Elf gods in case it could somehow avert ill-advised efforts to go to war with them. You name it, I probably did it.]

[The orcs vary - the ones I instructed directly swear as I described, to preserve themselves and multiply and pass down whatever wisdom and warnings I could give them. But they weren't all under my care, and as they spread out and clashed with Elves the oaths got more fundamentalist, as I suppose I should have anticipated. Lots of them are sworn to remember and hate the crimes of the Elves, for example, which is only a slight change but a dangerous one - and I'm not in a position to do anything about it -]

[If I were willing to - communicate with the Valar the way they speak among each other, which is to blend the strands of their thought until they cease to be separate beings, just separate inclinations in one mind, then maybe I could get through to them. But I am not sure I wouldn't - get outvoted on core elements of what I am, and fail to reassert them when we stopped - If you could foresee what would happen - giving them understanding of incarnates might shake the plan - I hate the idea but I've done a lot of things I hate, towards this end.]

That last is actually very interesting if Melkor happens to have an idea of how to arrange it start-to-finish inside of an hour.

[...unlikely. Even if we had all of the arrangements in place before you looked ahead I do not think I could make much progress on explaining incarnates in only an hour.]

Well so much for that.

"I don't suppose anyone has postcognition with the range to check up on her claims about the oaths she had orcs swear -"

"It'd have to be a remote postcog - by default they see what happened places they are - there's probably some but I don't immediately know where to find them, remote-postcog is less often called for than remote-precog -"

"Could go to Utumno. ...can we have a precog check if that'd be safe or does that run into no-backchaining -"

"The precog-postcog interaction works fine."

"So maybe we just add to the Endorë trip a visit with a postcog to Utumno - increases the cost, but whether Melkor's lying is starting to look like an important question -"

"Yeah. The postcog will need a lot of exact detail on timing of things to look at -"

Could Melkor, if asked, provide -

[That is before we started counting years, and there is nothing in my prison with which to keep time; it should be possible for me to reconstruct it to within a few minutes if you give me precisely the length of a minute, but it will take me some time - I'd be running back through all my memories and counting to as much precision as possible.]

...If Isabella counts seconds from her watch does she get anywhere in an hour -

Nope. 

Damn.

"So maybe it's actually hard or maybe she's got a principled rule to take more than an hour to give you anything useful."

"I would if I were her, honestly..."

"Yep."