"Oh. You certainly do not dawdle." 

"I don't! The last set of gods to get mad at me hated that about me!"

"Oh? How long did it take them to send metaphorical attack gryphons after you?" Leareth chuckles, then shakes his head. "I apologize. I am not laughing at you. While I recognize that we are extremely different in a number of ways, and I expect you to find many of my past choices here very questionable, I feel that in a few ways we are very alike." 

"Persons in a state of rebellion," suggests Bella.

"That will do, yes." And now they're at the cafeteria. 

"I wasn't in a state of rebellion in Arda," she remarks. "Like, pretty much the whole time. They seemed well-meaning." Food food food.

"The gods too? That...must have been a surreal thing to experience." 

"It was bizarre. They didn't seem perfect but they made such - paradisical mistakes -" Om nom nom.

Leareth loads up his plate of food, sits across the table from her. He seems amused. "Now I am curious to hear examples of paradisical mistakes." 

"The reason I did not already have a teleport was that they were worried if people could teleport they would visit remote locations and disturb wildlife that could only tolerate a lower level of encounters with people as enforced by being inconvenient to get to. There's an effect over Valinor to make it seem like the passage of time isn't urgent - it's very relaxing, I didn't like it but I don't think it was generally very unpopular - and when I invented an artifact to counter it they were worried that those artifacts being commonplace would pressure people who liked the slow vacationy feel into giving it up to keep pace with their neighbors. Uh, the god of the dead liked to 'fix' people before he brought them back to life - he'd fuzz out their memories of having done things he considered bad behavior, he'd turn the gay ones straight - but he was bringing them back to life, they were all going to live forever -"

"I see what you mean." Leareth is quiet for a long time. "But...then they drove you out? Why?" 

"I was friends with the prince. They thought I was a bad influence on him. They had - prophecies, those don't work like Foresight here does. In Arda the way it works is you don't get a vision of the future if that would make you do something to avert it. They're pointless. Except I don't count, somehow, I definitely averted the prophecies they had on him and they were able to show me what they had to work on averting it harder. He didn't like the time slide. And on top of that Valinor makes people grow slower - he's a little kid even though he's about three times my age, he wanted to grow up - so he invented the teleport and ran away to the other continent, by himself, it's dangerous there - I grabbed him back, but then when they were overwhelmed by how many changes I was introducing and how fast things were happening around them, they figured they couldn't just send me out of Valinor but had to get me out of the world altogether."

"And then you were bounced to Velgarth?" 

"They sent me back. I thought I'd die there, I'd done too much science, but - it turned out no time had passed, or that they sent me back in time, or something? It was the same place at the same moment that I'd had the original interplanar magic accident so I fell into the same spell and this time it sent me to Velgarth, yes."

"That is oddly convenient." Leareth looks thoughtful. "Anyway. You seem to have had a similar effect on the gods here, in terms of - inducing Them to panic. Hopefully They will be less effective at expelling you – if that had been an available option, I think They would have gone for it over revealing what I am fairly sure is Vkandis' secret backup army. The gods here are not omniscient; if They failed to observe a moment in the past, because They did not yet know it was relevant, They cannot go back and capture it. Or else They would have discovered my immortality method a long time ago." 

"...but now they're watching?"

"To the extent that They can, I am sure. Though it seems They are still not particularly accurate at predicting you. They will likely become more accurate over time – I am fairly sure this is what happened with some of my early work – but it took decades to centuries, then." 

"How do they watch people?"

"Indirectly. They mainly interact with planes other than this one. But - there is some kind of mechanism that generates Foresight, embedded in the structure of our world. Mortals can tap into it occasionally and briefly. For gods, I think it is their primary sensory modality." 

"So being inaccurate at predicting me is sort of like me being... blurry?"

"Approximately, yes. At the beginning They - or the mechanism They pull from, at least - must have had almost nothing on you. Most of your life history did not happen here. The way your magic works is alien to this world. I am not sure whether or not They could eventually incorporate you, over enough time, but currently I think you are very blurry to them." 

"Hopefully I will be gone by then."

"Hopefully!" 

"I don't, mind, have a destination lined up - I don't know what there is to be had. I don't think the Valar would notice me immediately if I went to Arda, if I chose my landing carefully, but I shouldn't plan on it. Definitely can't go back to Materia."

"Noted. I have even less information than you do, when it comes to possible arrangements of other worlds."