"Did they know you were going to do that."

"We made it as clear as we possibly could have."

"How very blue. Why were all these people mass-slaughtering each other -"

Sigh. "Thingol hired the Dwarves to do an expensive multiyear project and then told them at the end he wouldn't pay because he hated Dwarves. - uh, his people had a history of hunting them for sport, though it'd been a long time, by then, some people thought he'd gotten better. He wasn't subscribed to a dispute resolution service. One of them stabbed him."

"These days they tell you not to do anything worth more than you can write off for anyone who isn't subscribed to something."

"That's very sensible. They'd been working in Menegroth, making weapons for the war, for hundreds of years at that point and he'd always paid before. Anyway Thingol's people retaliated by slaughtering all the Dwarves in Menegroth, two survivors made it back to Tumunzahar, Tumunzahar sent out an army to try to retrieve any more survivors, ended up just laying waste to most of Doriath and taking the Silmaril for payment, Doriath sent a retaliatory force and killed most everyone in Tumunzahar and took the Silmaril back -

- we'd sworn to get the Silmarils from anyone who withheld them, because they were ours and we needed them. We wrote to Doriath offering to buy them. The messengers never returned. We attacked them."

"An impressive amount of mass slaughter."

"Everyone was dead anyway and it was affecting their judgment."

"It's bad timing, I suppose, if you'd written Tumunzahar offering to buy it from them... and get between them and Thingol, perhaps."

"I wish every day that we had. By the time we heard it was too late."

"Why wouldn't they sell it?"

"Why wouldn't Doriath? Because they were bloodthirsty idiots with a child king high off mass murder and eager to do more of it and sentimentally attached to the Silmaril since his parents stole it in what he was no doubt told was a grand act of heroism."

"Messy geopolitics you have there."

"It's probably all very simple by now."

"Oh, there's various drama but it tends not to bother us."

"Your world sounds really concerning."

"Are most of them nicer?"

"Yes!"

"Ours has evil torturegods too, that's not just you."

"And it'd be pretty nightmarish if one of them decided to go to war with us."

"No gods here, as far as we know."

"Aitim checked whether any of your religions were true before we came here. Just to be on the safe side."

"He checked? How do you mean, he checked?"

"He tracked outcomes at the sites of purported miracles and did scans on the relics in the Vatican and had some statisticians record the uses of augury and the results and so on, I don't know all the details, we just didn't want to rule out that there were powerful aliens or something behind all your superstitions."

"You don't suppose God might have any opinions on being checked?"