I haven't met any of them before so I might be misreading them, but I think you probably have more leverage than just 'you could refuse to do them favors but there's a universe full of evil gods so you wouldn't refuse to do them favors no matter how poorly they repay them.' You could demand they agree to some rules about what they will and won't do, for example, I think probably they'd agree to that. 

Maybe. The trouble is it'd be much better if it didn't have to be that rigid! I'm not myself that rigid! I would have agreed to interrogating the orcs that way and I would have agreed that it was Olórin's prerogative to undertake a suicide mission! But they didn't know that and they didn't think not - using me - was important compared to getting spells from me and -

Hmm. If they'd done all that to win some human war that was killing tens of thousands of people I'd be very angry with them, because it'd be obviously a horrendous miscalculation, thinking that getting one spell was more important than whatever delays and complications it might add to actually have your help. I think fighting Melkor is pretty different from that.

But it's hard to tell whether they in fact would have done the same thing either way, whether they were aware they were giving up something unfathomably important for something even more unfathomably important or whether they just didn't notice they were giving up something unfathomably important in the first place. 

It has seemed like they didn't notice and are mostly trying to smooth over - superficial social hurt just because I've demonstrated I'm upset. Leareth was like 'you can yell at me' like he was planning on paying a yelling-denominated fine as the cost of doing business, he - I'm probably reading too much into this honestly and don't remember his exact words but it sounded at the time like he was practically daring me to stop teleporting him places over it -

Hug. 

It must be very annoying how they don't seem to be able to predict your objections in any detail at all!

I didn't think it was that complicated!

Well I wouldn't have had any trouble but in their partial defense I think there are a lot of reasons why it's bad to mind-control people and some of them are inapplicable here and many of them are still applicable but overridden by other considerations and many of them are - applicable for reasons of precedents set which makes their applicability sort of smuggled in with the question of whether we're mad at them -

- and that's the sort of thing most people aren't accustomed to distinguishing carefully at all, even if they could pass a test with a hundred questions about whether mind control is okay in this situation yes or no.

Yeah, that's a good way to - disentangle it. She sighs. It really didn't help that I was going in hoping to just uncomplicatedly trust them because I know the other Van and I know our Fëanáro and would like to believe everyone they could grow up into and every child they could raise would be, not just great but also well-positioned to trust me in turn even though that's presumably very path dependent actually.

I should hope it's not path-dependent, actually? You're smart and you're trustworthy and you're intellectually careful and you care about this - grand project that I guess we've all stepped into, of combining all the magic systems to fight all the gods and fix everything. But I think it's - going to be slow. I'll be much more annoyed with them if I don't think they're even progressing in that direction but I don't actually begrudge them taking a long time.

Melkor -

- I should've talked more about Melkor, then maybe people would've understood -

I think there were lots of opportunities for people to understand and it's the Valar who would have needed to get it and they're - dense.

And they don't even want to be better. Or not badly enough, anyway.

Melkor uses all the good things about people against them. The wanting to talk, wanting to understand, wanting to trust - wanting to do the right thing - and I'm not saying you should fight him by giving up on talking and understanding and trusting and doing the right thing but - but I feel safer, when they treat us like strangers, when they act vaguely bewildered at the reminder that in normal interpersonal interaction everything they did is pretty far out of line -

I guess that's a good reason to be set up that way.

If they haven't gotten there in a couple of years then we can be disappointed Fëanáro's children turned out with such poor judgment.

All right. I guess I should have that much patience by now.

She pauses. She looks up at him.

He looks back at her.

- he blushes again.

"In my notes it said you were the one who told me about adulthood starting at fifty," she remarks.

"I think I didn't really think it through very much!!"

"I was going to just - wait out my remaining eleven years and then maybe seek clarification on whether they counted for the full amount of time or if the timeslide should count against me - before even thinking about it -"

"We can do that if you would like!"

"We obviously cannot since I have already thought about it!"

"- hmmm.

I guess there's nothing for it, then," he says, "and we should just kiss."

- she laughs, and floats up to kiss him.

Oh good!! This is the best thing that has ever happened!

It might well be!

Once the debrief is done and it seems like things have quieted down, Leareth looks for Maitimo.

(In the background, he's quietly frustrated about the entire interaction with Bella. It seems like he can't do reasonable ally things even when he's trying, and it's also impossible to communicate about it without just making things worse, and at this point he would kind of prefer to ignore the situation for a while and let it cool off rather than try to address it again, even though he probably should try to address it eventually. There has to be a reason why it didn't actually seem like a live option to talk to Bella first, but he doesn't have good enough recall of what he was thinking at the time to unravel it.) 

"Do you still need me here?" he asks Maitimo once he tracks him down.