" - I guess that's true."

"I wasn't sure she'd know how!"

"She's so perfect," Anaander says happily to the room at large.

"I'm actually sort of confused about why you like her though I acknowledge our general appeal!"

"I have some idea of how much of a handicap she is working at and I am very very impressed. And the phrases she uses are delightful, and I don't know if we'll be able to convey useful concepts to the Presger but I think we can at least end up on the same page about which things they need? And she's happy about good things and sad about bad things without - playing a lot of games on top of that -"

"Games?"

"Usually people do lots of things with their emotions and expressions thereof to achieve their goals and it's very tiring and transparent and you don't do it."

"I don't know how! But I like achieving things so maybe I will if I learn how."

"Well it'll help you achieve things with other people but not with me because I don't like it."

"Okay!"

"Other things that should maybe be on our agenda right now: should we start systematically looking for more of us? Should we start looking for more worlds, in general, since apparently there are a lot more than we thought? Do we have any guesses on why we can't see the Ardas?"

"We want more of us, I don't know how consistently we want yous..."

"Eru thinks it's entertaining. Or Erus think, I suppose."

"Looking for more worlds before having an approach to... approaching them... might be a mistake, gives us more to triage and hack at with what we have on hand, but I guess we could get lucky and land on somebody like Mirelótë's Valar early on and then thwack everything else on the list with that."

"But we could also land on something really dangerous before we have the resources to handle it. I tentatively think knowing more universes will make evil mes behave better."

Rirosseth nods.

"Why?"

"Cooperation is much more robust than being adversarial. Being adversarial is only a good idea when your enemies are known to you to have certain ranges of capabilities. If you know they can't hurt you you can go ahead and be adversarial, and if you know they'll try to hurt you no matter what then it does, but under all other circumstances it's probably going to get you destroyed, whereas being cooperative gives you options later. Anaander and Magic were both evil when they'd had absolute power for centuries and had no expectation this would change, and - not, obviously, attempting to excuse them in the slightest - after they had tried being cooperative first and had it fail to get them what they wanted. I think a version of them who learned that there were powerful entities they needed to negotiate with, and decided to be evil instead, would be much stupider than they were."

Rubelite listens very intently to this and then nods.

"That sounds about right to me though also I did a lot of evil things because of having previously seen fit to bindingly commit to them and that seems like a pattern to be careful of with - Maitimor - more generally."

"Caramel to the teeth if I hear 'I swear', but what other precautions does this suggest?"

"I mean there's no point to a commitment that hasn't been publicized, maybe we can just ask a couple of people who pay any attention to politics about notorious public commitments from their ruler."

"Nobody was that specific about what was going on in Sirion, and I'm not sure how they'd've characterized it under calmer circumstances, so it might depend on where we ask."

Nod.

"So looking for additional uses - cautiously, looking for more worlds, probably also very cautiously until we're better resourced to solve their problems or at least to let them help us solve ours."