"I find a lot of what you say hard to - contextualize," Cam remarks.

"By which I mean I don't really know what you're getting at and would appreciate it if you rephrased it, or gave examples, or something."

'For example?'

"...in this case I still don't know how having me along would help anything. I don't feel clear on what we'd be doing or how it would be better with my assistance."

It takes them a while to formulate a response, and they speak slowly once they do.

'I have told you what I want to be done on my Earth, in some amount of detail, and will have time to elaborate on and clarify that before it is possible for me to return there.  There is some chance that I will have conveyed it poorly, and some chance that you conveyed yourself poorly to me and are going to murder people or otherwise intentionally take actions to weaken me.

'With the people I will be speaking to on my Earth, there will also be these chances.  I will have less time to explain things and get to know them in, as well.  It is my intuition that, if I go alone, I am taking the full weight of each chance separately.  It is also my intuition that if you came, and helped to explain things, that I would have to make the same mistake twice in order to make one at all, because you and the other person would have an additional opportunity to notice if the other was misunderstanding or malicious.'

"I know that you want to give people souls so they can be resurrected and that your powers somehow work by means of doing art. I don't actually know what that looks like on a - project management level. If you need me to... translate Japanese, book hotel rooms, pawn things for cash, act as your agent in art galleries, construct a museum on the Moon, source materials out of which to create blackout poetry, teach myself IRB proposal lingo and get legal permission to turn people into vampires... I can probably do most of those things but the last one sounds really hard? But I don't know what kinds of things you would make mistakes while trying to do."

'I do not know what almost any of those things are.'

"And I do not know what the things you would need me to do instead are."

'I think I also do not know these,' they admit.

"One thing we could do, if you're willing to wait, is I could get some people from New Valinor to hold the door for me, spend a few months getting the rest of the Elf resurrections done, lightleap back to Valinor to deal with war dead and make sure people know where my summoner is, and then come back."

'I do not think I am very willing to wait while there are people irretrievably dying.

'Also my picture of your situation and its logistics is unclear and I don't understand how many of the terms you use fit into it.'

"It's a long story. I should at some point tell it to you anyway, I guess."

'That seems likely to be helpful.'

"Demons can be summoned. Usually we are summoned to an Earth, which is probably similar in some respects to the one you know, and under some magical restrictions that prevent us from doing whatever we want without human oversight. In a - freak accident, I was summoned to Arda, instead. Without any bindings on. They were in the middle of a war with an evil god. Anything I need to clarify so far -"

'What is a war.  Expand on 'evil god'.'

"A war is a large-scale armed conflict. The evil god was a Vala, I don't know if you've come across anything about Valar poking through the library. They're magical entities, poorly defined powers, and there are fifteen, one of whom likes torturing people a lot."

'I see.'

"So, I got summoned by a child belonging to a host of Elves who were planning to travel to the planet on which the evil god was conducting his war and fight him, and since if my summoner dies or dismisses me I vanish back to Hell I went and made the summoner kid and his family and some people to keep them company a safe planet in the middle of nowhere where nobody else knew the location to wait out the conflict, and once I'd determined to my satisfaction that they weren't making up how evil the god was I helped with the war, material support mostly. Any of that need clarifying -"

'No.'

"Valar, Maiar, Elves, and orcs who are an Elf offshoot species, can all make binding oaths, which means that if they say out loud in the correct phrasing they will do something then they have to and can no longer choose otherwise. Melkor, the evil god, and his associate evil Maiar, could spoof this by making illusory sound, which doesn't count as speaking aloud for this purpose. But a friendly Maia, Melian queen of Doriath, enabled me to test that I can conjure for all and only recordings of spoken words by a particular speaker. Which allowed me to verify that oaths were actually made, for purposes of negotiating anything we wanted the other side held to."

Nod.

"Eventually he offered - everything we wanted, a complete stop to all the torture and all the war for him and all his Maiar and the orcs too, an excruciatingly detailed oath about it -

- if I went to Valinor where the other fourteen Valar lived and put a black hole in it."

They don't respond at all for several seconds, and then, abruptly -

- it's awfully cold in here.