"I feel like this obliges your rulers to tolerate an awful lot of assassination or else to spend a lot of mental energy on their own security."

"...no, it doesn't, because people don't try to assassinate them."

"That sounds awfully unlikely."

"Orcs and Dwarves have some non-ceremonial security but not like this."

"What would happen if someone teleported into your ruler's palace at home?"

"We don't have a translation effect so someone would fetch Fëanáro to figure out how to talk to them, if they didn't speak any languages any of us knew. I suppose if he wasn't available the nearest Maia might do."

"And you wouldn't worry that he meant to destroy the whole city or summon a demon or trap the ruler's soul in a sword or so-on? What if he did mean to do those things?"

"Those are not going concerns at home. We do have emergency services, they can get the Valar."

"Huh. Maybe your gods are more interventionist. Abadar would help us in a war, or if another deity attacked us, or if something on that scale happened, but if the pharaoh got murdered by people who stole his soul so he couldn't be resurrected, Abadar'd just pick the next one, it's not his job to make sure nothing bad ever happens."

"Some people prefer lower levels of intervention and live farther away from where the Valar are walking down the street all the time but would still get ahold of them if somebody died. - our souls may not be the same as yours, but still."

"People die too often for the gods to take any particular interest in it. Abadar does take particular interest in the pharaoh, but - he still expects the pharaoh to do the actual work of protecting himself and his country without oversight, it'd be bad incentives if he bailed us out when we were careless."

"Maybe it would be less work if anyone were staying on top of it. And if you weren't dying for no good reason all the time."

"Maybe. Don't get me wrong, your gods will be very popular if they raise people all the time."

"They might not be able to do your species. Dwarves still don't come back if they have an accident because they don't have the same kind of soul as Quendi and orcs, and Aulë, who designed them, hasn't convinced Eru about resurrection yet. - he invented them before they'd learned as much as they know now, it wasn't obvious to him at the time that there was a design flaw in irreversible death, but they still don't just wear out and die even if nothing happens to them."

"I mean, souls here are supposed to be here temporarily and then get sorted to the afterlives. I think making the afterlives better and more permanent is probably more important."

"Supposed to by whom?"

"The local gods. And also lots of people, people work hard to get the afterlife they want."

"Well, the local gods do not seem universally to know what they are doing and if people want to move somewhere I do not see why they have to die about it."

Snort. "Fair enough."

"These days Ulmo lives on Endorë to do re-embodiments there if someone brings him a soul, but if someone manages to die so that their soul is destroyed, the data makes it to Mandos, the Vala of the dead, who can make them a new one. Then they're on Valinor, because that's where Mandos is, but they can still get on a ship and fly home. Orcs are generally shipped home in chip form, Valinor isn't suited to them, but still."

"Well, if they'll take over doing that here it'd be very convenient. What are their teachings?"

"...I'm not sure what you mean."

" - like, what do they tell their followers to do, what kinds of people do they select as their clerics. Abadar teaches that trade is good and that people ought to be responsible as far as possible for their own affairs and that it's important not to steal or present yourself defiantly to authority and that war is wrong and that you ought to work with people despite ideological disagreements as far as they're capable of cooperation. Whereas, say, Shelyn would say that art and music and beauty are important and that you should believe in everyone and love your enemies and so on. They wouldn't necessarily disagree but there are differences in emphasis at minimum, and of course some gods do disagree."

"They mostly don't go in for that sort of thing more than anyone else does? I could list their opinions but I could just as well list the opinions of random Dwarves I have met. Dwarves teach that trade is good, they're very emphatic about it. Uh, the Valar used to be a bit more opinionated but they were basing much of that on things Eru told them which turned out to have been for stupid Eru reasons, and now they use more consensus-building approaches."

" - huh."