The cleanup is well in progress. Everything seems under control. 

Leareth tracks down Bella. :Are you holding up all right?: he asks. 

I'll cope. What's up?

:I wish to explain something, and apologize; I ask that you hear me out on it before you decide your response: 

Okay.

He looks her in the eye. :Maitimo asked me to confirm, urgently, whether any of Melkor's Maiar were outside Angband at the time of the attack, or whether there were contingency plans in case of Angband's destruction that might spring on us now. From what I had heard of Melkor, these seemed not unlikely as precautions he would take. Vanyel had questioned some orcs under Truth Spell and not gotten very far, he had obtained some names for their leadership but there are many thousands of them and the Noldor could not find them instantly. So - I read a number of orcs with Thoughtsensing, in order to find their leadership before they had a chance to slip away. They were, in fact, making plans to do so and might have succeeded. Vanyel was asleep and not available to Truth Spell them, so I used a compulsion to imitate Truth Spell, briefly, it was for about a minute. I removed them immediately once I had learned what I needed, which is that all his Maia were onsite and there are no traps hanging over our heads; there is a great deal more to tidy up but it is not urgent and can wait for Vanyel. I feel that the leadership of a place such as Angband are more legitimate military targets for a coercive interrogation than most:

He ducks his head. :Nonetheless, I expect you to be angry. It would be reasonable on your part. That is a cost I accepted when I chose this, including the part where you may not wish to give me rides to strange worlds anymore. I decided I preferred it to the risk of, for example, us failing to check in time and Sauron landing on Vanyel's head while he is too tired to fight. However, I will not try to evade paying that price, so, go ahead and shout at me if you wish: 

I'm not going to shout at you. I'm just going to be exasperated. With a list of Maiar and the earcuff I could have checked for them even if they were a thousand miles away.

The orcs are under oaths, every one of them old enough to talk. I don't know exactly how the ones that wind up in leadership positions are selected but it's entirely plausible to me that they're effectively innocent victims.

:...Can you do that? I think I am still calibrating to your earcuff's capabilities. Although obtaining the full list of involved Maiar in the first place was much of the work - if you can in fact search for them, you should check anyway, Melkor managed to capture my alt so I am really not sure it is possible to be too careful here. How do oaths work?: 

You should probably ask a Quendi. It was irresponsible of them not to explain before having you do anything with the orcs, actually, I don't think it can have been reasonably assumed that you wouldn't fuck one up irretrievably if you contradicted an oath with a compulsion.

Give me the list and I'll see if they're reachable by earcuff or not. I think it's not hard to derive from what you know about it! It searches for a person I specify and then closes telepathic distance! If they don't exist, it doesn't put me in range of anyone, and if it does, I can tell they're there!

:That is fair enough. I have not fully updated on your help being an available resource, and so it did not occur to me when I was rushed and had mentally marked you as busy with healing: 

He can get her out the list.

:Is there anything else your earcuff can do to help us locate anyone whose names we do not know, if we are searching for troop placements and such? I assume Maitimo knows where all of the Noldor troops are supposed to be, but we have not yet obtained anything like complete information on Melkor's deployments: 

It only does one person at a time. I don't specifically need names but I need to know who they are in a general sense, 'an orc soldier' won't do.

:I think we have at least some names for soldiers who were not onsite, I will have that collected and passed on to you if you are willing to help locate them. Also, do you know why there were so many small orc children? Nobody has actually explained it to me, I was very startled - that reminds me, I ought check in and see if the Noldor I asked set up a more pleasant area for them while we figure out what to do there: 

Where were you expecting adult orcs to come from?

:I was not expecting the ratio of children to adults to be so high! Also I was not expecting the children to be raised in the torture prison! Do they not have other cities...: Sigh. :You know, on reflection, Angband may well have been the safest and most fortified place for an orc to raise a family recently. I was surprised but I could probably have predicted the small children if I had thought through everything, though there are really an overwhelming number of them: 

Well, if nobody has a better idea for where to put them I have a spell that'll materialize a bungalow and I can cast it an unlimited number of times if Olórin or Huan'll follow me around.

:You should probably check in with the Noldorin leadership because I am not actually in charge here, but that sounds like an excellent idea for now! Why do you have a spell that materializes a bungalow? It is useful but so specific: 

I moved to Tol Eressëa to get away from the time slide till I had a countermeasure, and found that living on a platform up a tree was not for me. The spell I was imitating actually does an extradimensional space in a house shape with servitor spirit things and food but mine just does a house.

:–That still feels very impossible to me even though I know your magic is different. Is it always an identical house?: 

No, freely changeable floorplan and whatnot. If the Quendi will be depressed to see a lot of the same house I should ask them to come up with variants for me. Sigh.

:That is an incredibly impressive application of magic! I assume it is pretty enough for Quendi since you lived in Valinor, you could ask Maitimo if the sameness is itself a problem...: 

He stops, frowns. :Is something troubling you?: 

You mean besides how you decided to reduce my concerns about mind control to whether or not I would yell at you and risked the sanity of some number of orcs by fucking around with their already thoroughly ill-treated psyches not even knowing what oaths are? Or the thing where I was enlisted in a plan that could have killed an alt of my friend without my knowledge and only didn't because someone as an afterthought decided to mention to me that he might be retrievable? Or the thing where Melkor is also similarly retrievable? Or the thing where there are copies of all my friends around but they haven't known me for the last twenty years and don't especially have any reason to like me except insofar as I can do them magical favors, but my actual friends have to stay where they are to avoid startling anyone until the stupid, stupid Valar have been gently convinced not to replicate the entire tragedy that played out here? No, apart from that I'm having a great week.

He looks down. 

:I am sorry. For all of it, but - in particular, I think I am not a very good ally. It did not occur to me at all to ask you, because on some level my mind does not see you as someone who would offer help if I asked. And... I am not the one who has the most context here, but I think you should have been told the plan - not at first, since I cannot fault their earcuff security concerns given their priors, but at least when you brought Vanyel to our Velgarth. You could have spoken behind my shields; I would have considered that more than sufficient precautions. Of course, the fact that I know your trustworthiness with information makes that an easier call for me: 

The extremely powerful extradimensional people are glaring at each other and - he actually doesn't want to deal with it, it's not his Leareth, people are still dying in the fight to clear Angband and make sure they have all the prisoners out, but -

Is everything all right? he asks both of them.

We are discussing various things, like whether I should magic up a lot of cute little bungalows to put orcs and such in, and if it was responsible to use compulsions on orcs under oath to get them to do things likely contrary to those oaths even if you think compulsions are under normal circumstances unobjectionable. I don't think it's time-sensitive if there's people waiting for me in the infirmary.

- they're not under oaths, Melkor's dead. That happens to be safe even when they're under oaths for the same reason you can't swear to be able to fly, but it's not in this case relevant. I think orcs might object to cute little bungalows because of the "cute" part, they seem to dislike Quendi architecture as much as we dislike theirs.

- the oaths go away when the Ainu they're sworn to dies? How could you possibly know that in advance, who else died? The bungalows can look like whatever if you want to hunt up an orc architect. They do have to be one story tall, though, I didn't spend long enough on the spell to get it to do stairs. I'd need a Maia to do a lot of them.