"There's one bad Vala. The other ones stopped him but before that he liked to get people to have wars. But they didn't just conquer each other because they felt like it, he had to try!"

"People can be - stupid, thoughtless, selfish - sometimes they do things that hurt other people to benefit themselves; sometimes they hurt other people a lot to benefit themselves only a little - that's just how things are," says Stalas. "But a lot of the time they can be talked out of it. I like doing that."

"Orcs used to - sort of be like that, but that's because they had a..." Vocab-failure handwave. "Chip problem, and the Valar fixed it, and now they're better. Dwarves are different but not like that."

He shrugs. "So maybe people in your world are all naturally virtuous."

"Not all of them - maybe it's just the numbers -"

"The numbers?"

"How many naturally virtuous people there are?"

"So people in your world are naturally virtuous much more often?"

"Maybe. So there's fourteen good Valar and one bad one, and same with Maiar, and only a handful of bad Quendi - who don't meet each other and don't set each other off - orcs are a little worse but mostly very sweet, Dwarves too..."

"And people in Thedas are mostly - not outright evil, but not very good either - and so they can't trust each other as much, which makes things worse, and everyone thinks of being not-very-good as normal, which also makes things worse..."

"Yes."

"Yeah that seems very plausible."

"Well, that will make this place harder to fix, although it would still probably be improved if you all stopped dying for no reason - you're all so young -"

"I'll put it on the list for after we end the Blight."

Nod.

"Anyway, if I have to individually speak to every person in this world and convince them all to be nicer to each other, I'll do it," he says.

"...how many people is that?"

"Not sure. I know there are about three hundred thousand dwarves in Orzammar... I'd guess maybe five or ten million people in the world? Nobody but the qunari knows how many qunari there are, and I can only guess vaguely about the other surface nations. Elissa might have better estimates of surface populations outside Par Vollen."

"Well, then that will take a very long time and the dying for no reason will have to be fixed first."

"Yes."

"There might be a way to fix it without the Valar helping - they didn't even know Quendi were there yet till Oromë found us. So it wasn't them making it so we live till something happens and maybe we could figure it out even if the Valar never find this place. It might have been Eru making us like that, though."

"Oh, who needs gods," says Stalas. "They sound like more trouble than they're worth, on the whole. We'll figure it out ourselves."

"The Valar took some work but they're very useful and I'm fond of them!"

"Oh? What kind of work?"

"They don't work like - people with species - and needed things explained to them, like time and mixed feelings and communication the way people do it... but they're very good now and have always meant well."