"Is he just always like that? I don't know how long you were there before you came and got me..."

"Most of a day. And - he is probably going to be like that for the foreseeable future, yeah."

"Why?"

"I've decided this doesn't need to be widely known in our world, because the people who'd be intrigued would mostly be intrigued for the wrong reasons. But - okay. Elves have - a means of putting their brains on computers. So they can be copied, or stored, or run much faster than normal. Arda was in the middle of a war. One party in the war had taken to killing people, taking the mechanical copies of their brains, and - instantiating them, with some kind of science, so he could torture them constantly and as if a lot of time was passing in very little real time -"

"What why would you even do that."

"Very good question. He'd been doing it for a long time before Cam arrived, but when Cam did he, uh, offered to stop, in exchange for Cam killing his enemies. Arda's magic system has a way of bindingly making promises."

"Cam killed fifty-five million people. From what he said, it was worth it."

"That's more people than the entire country."

"It was an entire planet."

"He can put most of them back. Because of the brain computers."

"Most of them?"

"There's a species that doesn't have the brain computer and also there's a stage of pregnancy that doesn't have them and apparently Elves never lose pregnancies and are devastated about that."

"Oh."

"So that's why he's sad."

"I guess that's a good reason."

"Just a bit, yeah."

"Would he have been okay with you telling me -?"

"He thinks that how he feels about any of it shouldn't be a consideration. I'm mostly not going to tell people because they'll be stupid but the reason he didn't originally want to rule Mars was because he was presuming it'd be unfair not to tell everyone and that they'd object to his having authority."

"I don't think I'd trust anybody who's currently running a country with the ability to kill fifty-five million people either."

"Me neither. But I trust him, and I just asked for a bunch of stuff from Arda that'll let me verify it just in case he knew my alt long enough to figure out how to lie to me and still thought confessing to killing those people was a good idea for some reason."

"What'd you get?"

"All Nelyafinwë Maitimo's notes - if he's me he won't mind, if he's not me I will stop once I determine we're being misled. He would probably mind if I let you read them, but I'll send you relevant stuff."

"Okay."