"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."

"Does anyone have a world-searching procedure besides me, because there's reason to think most people trying mine die but we could see if we can hire Thuringwethil to do it. And my Arda can be reached from my planet - temporarily - and from the empty one."

"Our dimensional transit spells require some knowledge of the destination."

"If Eru gets done having fun with this my Valar might be able to get an upgrade out of him for it but no guarantee."

"I have no reason to think most people who try mine don't die but we were going to check up on that and in principle they shouldn't die right away outright."

"Do you expect Eru'll get done having fun?"

"I don't know what updates to make to my previous belief that he was done having fun using live people as toys. Did he really not make any comment other than calling the place 'tasteless', Maitimo -"

"He said: "I can see where she is! It's a bit tasteless. I didn't send her. I am sure she'll be glad she went. No, no, that's enough questions, you're all getting far too easy to startle. You need equanimity. Contentment and conviction." And then he left."

"There you have it. I suppose I could try not to be glad I went. It does put an upper bound on how long we could be hedged out but the upper bound is probably something like a thousand years."

"I'll be upset a lot sooner than that but we only asked about you, at the time."