Thank you. It's not actually important but I appreciate having a model.

My Maitimo is also awake if you'd like to double up on conversations, get up to speed quicker - we think you're the last person we expect, for whatever value of 'expect' is reasonable under the circumstances.

Thank you, yeah, we're talking. He thinks really really highly of you.

It's mutual. It's hardly the most regrettable thing in the scenario - taking 'the scenario' to mean really either of 'your Arda's context' or 'the apparently broad range of potential relationship paradigms between the two of us' - but I do regret that you and Cam weren't able to get very well acquainted given all there was demanding both of your attention.

I would have really liked to have met him at literally any other time in my life. But I expect at some point in the next couple thousand years things'll calm down and we can get to know each other.

I can't guarantee he'll want to circle back to things he was doing and people he used to work with a thousand years previously by then - he's not even two hundred in short years yet - but it'll probably be possible.

I suppose I'll have to be up to interesting things.

That's the way. How are you holding up?

I am mostly very encouraged. The spread of stuff we've got suggests - more ways to solve problems than I thought there were an hour ago. And even if this is all the instances of us welcome for this particular experiment it's probably not all the universes. 

Of course most of them seem unspeakably horrible but then, so was ours until we got extradimensional help.

Yes, I'm not really as happy as one might expect about having the nicest universe.

You are the only difference your Maitimo and I have been able to identify.

Oh, yes, it was almost certainly me, but don't make too big a deal out of it, I like it when people come to the conclusion on their own and then I get additional credit for something that is sort of like humility if you squint.

Well, here I am responsibly having come to the conclusion on my own. Do you think the arguments you used to convince your Valar will be persuasive to ours -

They might not be in the most receptive mood when next they can hear arguments.

They really might not.

I think the best bet would be mine talking to them.

And Maitimë's? Magic's?

Magic's are worse and I don't know why, and Matimë's sound about the same as yours to start with but farther along and with more bad decisions behind them and a long period where we don't have updates on how things are going since they last chatted, but my first bet would still be mine talking to them.

That makes sense. Does Belmarniss think that any of the local gods are promising?

My impression is no - there was some paperwork on which she declined to list a favorite deity, though that might mean her favorite is socially unacceptable or something - but I haven't asked about it specifically.

As far as I understand it Abadar is - friendly to many goals we have but not interested in being more than a resource in the locally conventional fashion.

That's my impression too, he didn't sound like he was going to drop everything and start trying to apply the force of multiversal exploitability to some worthwhile problem he just hasn't had the resources for until now. I haven't met him but I'm tempted to compare him to a narrow Maia and I don't know what if anything would cause him to make an exception to his habits. The deities may vary, some of them were once incarnates of various sorts. Belmarniss is sleeping but it's worth asking her when she's up.

Definitely. I'm also sort of curious if all the evil gods are as intractable as Melkor but on the other hand am very reluctant to extend any of them any benefit of the doubt ever.

Now we know what happens if you do that, yep. But they may have different instructive examples here - Ainur in general are the sort of things where you can expect that if they're a way they will stay that way, gods here might not be fundamentally like that.

I'm unclear on how hard the local gods are to talk to but it seems worth figuring out.