Probably a good idea; what to do about Melkor is separate from what to do about the colony.

Yeah. Okay.

She puts out a request for bids.

Isabella comes up with suitable inscrutable codes for redundancy with the cipher.

And they find someone for what they say is another round of Endorë scouting.

And the message, decoded, says that the Valar move her and adjust Mandos so that psionics doesn't let you speak to the dead or in jail.

They just had to throw in the dead, didn't they.

Surprised?

Not really.

I think it's still worth it. My mother'll be crushed, but -

I wish we knew who it was who was talking to her -

Yeah, me too. Even remote viewing wouldn't help with that, though - 

Yep. Mindreading Melkor would, but that's its own can of worms.

I mean, if anyone's sacrificed their right to the expectation of mental privacy -

Oh, sure, I'm just not sure if it's - safe to mindread a Vala?

Could we foresee whether it would be?

Suppose -

They can get another ciphered answer from the long-range precog; an hour isn't long enough to get ahold of a mindreader and get them in range.

Mindreading a Vala is like trying to mindread a crowd of several hundred people all at once; it's not dangerous but it's not very useful. Melkor really hates Eru's plan, she's sincere about that, but beyond that they have no idea, sorry, couldn't even confidently say that she's talking to anyone?

And getting a better mindreader is hard enough that they'd need a better precog to cover the hiring time - ugh.

Might be worth it.

Maybe -

- but the better mindreaders tend to have policies requiring that they be on long-term retainer for, uh, exactly this reason -

So the question is whether we want to spend the entire budget tracking down some idiot psion who thought it'd be a good idea to talk to the evil god and found her charming and reasonable - which is to say, really, how likely is it that she talked them around to doing her bidding, that this doesn't involve anything noticeable in the next few months, and that we won't catch it in time -

She's less charismatic when I'm pretending to be a generic person but still worryingly likable.

And the sort of person who'd reach out to her in the first place is probably also the sort of person inclined to lap that up -

Yeah.

Fuck.

First mistake, information security, there was no reason for the population of Earth to learn that our world even had an evil god - second mistake, didn't reassess all of my assumptions about our safety in the light of the arrival of worldchanging magic - ugh ugh ugh - 

Okay. Year-range psion, really excellent mindreader on retainer, that spends practically all of our money but it has to do it -