I might be able to exclude Valar, but not gods in general yet...

Valar are probably less bad than average for gods, because of the being slow and not paying much attention...

Yeah. This place might be the best we can do.

I think we should do a couple more jumps to check. But if it is, that's okay, Endorë until we can make a sphere of our own.

Sounds like a plan.

Why do you think the - you and the me if she is a me - like the Valar here -

It's possible their Valar are better. It's possible their Valar haven't had a chance to be catastrophically wrong - I liked ours, when all they'd done was stop Melkor and invite us to paradise...

It's later, here, and they've invented more things even if they aren't magic...

Yes, but maybe they went very very slow. And apparently there aren't any prophecies.

Yeah.

It might be that these ones are better. I just don't want to place any weight on ice that looks thicker than the last ice we tried standing on -

Yeah.

Squeeze.

"So," he says a few hours later when his alt is listening to a recording of an orcish translation of the Ainulindale, frowning, "how does magic work?"

"Wizardry? - do you not have magic songs here, that just occurred to me as an implication of all your magic being Ainur -"

" - we don't. Magic songs?"

"I don't sing well enough to do most of them..."

He does! Now there's a windstorm.

"Huh. No, that's not a thing, we'd have noticed - how do you do it, what can you do -"

He lists things.

Bella has notes on it from when she was investigating for the first time.

"These are useful," he says, sounding slightly surprised. "I should get Macalaurë, he'll be delighted."

"Who's that?"

"My son."

Nod. "Anyway, so there's magic songs and there's magic jewelry, native to the flat Arda, but I can't do the jewelry one at all, it needs osanwë - the magic kind, I bet the chip kind doesn't do it - and I don't have it, I just sort of pretend with subtle arts."

"Huh. Yes, we don't have any magic. How does the jewelry version work -"