do you recall when the war was just a game?

"A lot of them will suffer more, first, and more námor will keep entering slavery. That's not satisfactory."

"Why didn't you just spread a horrible plague to kill everyone and resurrect us one at a time as our benevolent saviors who would of course have an unquestionable right to set their own laws in their own worlds?"

"- there are so many reasons not to do that that I wonder if you're not being sarcastic."

"I am finding your understanding of right and wrong very alien and have thrown out most of my assumptions. It is my lack of understanding that leads me to ask, not a desire to communicate disapproval."

"We don't want to kill people. Even given the ability to come back to life, many people find it traumatic or simply prefer to avoid it. It creates a discontinuity across which it can be difficult to find family members and friends - we often have this issue with orcs, who are sometimes already extinct by the time we find their worlds, but at least can be mass-resurrected without the normal scarce resources we use for standard resurrections, though their case of finding family is made worse by it being customary for most of them not to have names. A plague would be a particularly horrible way to do it even if we did want to start over; deaths from illness are slow and miserable. It would be particularly destructive to anything that's worth preserving about your culture - we change a lot by being here but not nearly as much as we would if we brought you all back to life in small batches with no physical continuity. It would make any societies we contacted in the future, including ones that could put up meaningful resistance that we might find one day, right to mistrust and oppose us. It would deprive us of the experience we accumulate by working through all these issues with you instead of for you and make us worse-equipped for, again, any future situations where we in fact couldn't just wipe out a planetful of people. All the trillions of people who object to murder and belong to Vanda Nossëo would vote to leave, or to change the law to prevent us from doing it again; it would wreck our relationship with Mîr and Elendil who are administratively separate. Personnel would resign in protest. It would be ecologically disruptive for all the animals that were left behind in a world transformed by human activity and suddenly deprived of humans."

"I suppose that makes sense, though I think if Sesat could put up meaningful resistance this would have gone differently from the start and I'm not convinced this is effective training for that sort of case - I'd expect one of the first things I'd ask for if I had more leverage to be power. If it were up to me and on the table and I had a good idea how to explain myself to my people, I'd sell all of Sesat's chattel slaves to you and promise to take no more ever again for Loki's spells and some way to pass them on. And maybe I could be argued down to some lesser magic but nothing other than power would do. I'd expect, if you truly couldn't stop toying with us whenever you felt like it, you'd be willing to offer a lot of things you aren't willing to offer us."

"We aren't hoarding the spells as negotiating leverage, it's because they're gated behind being sufficiently certain you won't use them to hurt people. The teleport was put together in what I am told was an inelegant way that happens to have massive abuse potential and it can't ever be in the hands of anyone who'd use it to teleport a planet into a sun. There are more resources we could be throwing at the planet if we thought they'd help, the kind of thing we use as signing perks - resurrections, colony planets. Not the ability to drop everyone into a sun."

"And if I had the ability to cast an entire planet into nightmare-haunted sleep until they perished of thirst, you'd say something different."

"I wouldn't be talking to you at all. That's well above my level of competence. I'm sure it would be different in a lot of ways, if you had more ability to hold people hostage than you in fact do, but I'm not sure it would go better for you."

"Well, perhaps you are that stubborn. I keep having the sense that there's some contradiction in my understanding of your goals and values but every time I go fishing for it I come up empty."

"Well, if you don't know what it is I don't either. We want the flourishing of all námor. Everything else is - details, tradeoffs, risks, investments, incentives - but fundamentally, the flourishing of all námor."

"And animals, I gather."

"Not everyone in Vanda Nossëo cares about those. Those of us who do try to work on it in ways that don't impinge on the námor, by making meat that was never an animal cheaper and easier to get and things like that."

"And everyone in Vanda Nossëo does care about the flourishing of all námor - is it a long vowel like that, by the way, námor rather than namor?"

"Yes, it's from Quenya, but since it's a loanword it will work fine if you pronounce it in your own accent. Not every individual in Vanda Nossëo does care about that. Some of them just care about their families and their hobbies and so on. But the ones who aren't in prison are at least not impeding it much."

"I think maybe the thing that feels contradictory to me is that you keep telling me you're doing this for the flourishing of all namor, and - actually as far as I can tell unconflicted about refusing my people what I think of as flourishing, but maybe that's another word that isn't translating well."

"Maybe we need to update the word 'flourishing' too. But - not everyone can flourish in the exact way they want all at the same time. If you want to flourish by owning chattel slaves, that's not the kind of thing we're about, because they're námor too. If somebody wants to flourish by... sneaking cameras into people's houses and broadcasting their private moments, they can't do that either. If someone wants to flourish by learning destruction magic from Disappear but they're an alcoholic and might annihilate a nonreductionist person or put out a few stars using it recklessly, the people they'd put at risk are námor too. Everyone flourishing has to mean everyone finding ways to flourish that don't hurt anyone else, that's kind of what 'everyone' means. So we're trying - not very effectively, I will grant - to find a way for that to include you."

"Mm. I - see it but the spread of examples leaves me unsure there's not another factual misunderstanding in there. Do you want to know what it'd mean for me personally to flourish, or people I've met?"

"Please, tell me."

"I would want... to get far away from everyone except my own loved ones, but that's negotiable, really, and to - I used to think 'be good enough with a sword that people leave me alone', but that isn't about the specific traits of sharp bronze. Less concretely, for anyone who might consider harming me to be afraid. Not terrified, and not to expect me to come after them if they did nothing, but to be afraid to try to fight me and afraid to try to harm anyone I care about and afraid to try to take anything of mine. The reputation I was gaining in the army. Books, I want to say, but again that's not quite right - people to talk to could be enough, but some way of hearing new ideas - and the chance to write, or something like it. And when I picture it I picture having a friend to trade off braiding flowers into each other's hair, which is really about... I won't marry, unless I or my wife have Loki's spells, because I don't want my wife and children to be vulnerable or an option for someone else to try to get to me, but I still want to ever touch another person, and I want beauty in my life, and I want to be liked, and I want peace and leisure enough to do things like that, and of course having long enough hair for that is a cultural signal... I would want peace, but not a peace that was worse than war.

"Someone else I know would want to learn to do new things, explore things, get to be with their loved ones, be known to others, be treated with respect... I bet that person would like to learn to draw, or learn wizardry, or learn chemistry, or all three, anything to give their mind something to do... and they would want to be worthy of respect, of course. Would need to know themself for the sort of person who deserves respect. Would need, I suppose, to earn it.

"Another person I know might not feel the need to earn respect - I assume they do, because people do in general, but I don't have extra evidence that this person specifically does - I think this person would need to matter. I would have thought this person should invest in land that came with some serfs and deeply, deeply enjoying being someone worth bringing complaints to, someone who made them happier than they'd've been otherwise - I think that's a few things, wanting power and wanting others to be happy and wanting to be better than the alternatives at making people happy, maybe also being trusted and knowing themself to be trustworthy. Having the chance to experiment with farming techniques, learning more about the world and making the whole world better off for having that knowledge. Getting to be out of the city, in the countryside. Coming to understand what the world is when not shaped by namor, and how it works to shape it, and what results that brings.

"And I do know someone else who wants power for power's sake, who wants to make people do things and laugh about it. But not only that. Also to be safe. Also to take care of people. To have people who are theirs - not slaves they bought, people whose loyalty lies with them - and keep them in good condition. And to run and dance and sing and see the world. To see different cities, different crowds that act slightly differently, or very differently if they're aliens. To be loved. To deserve to be loved, I think. To marry and have children. To laugh. To make others laugh. To be able, when something happens that makes them happy, to get more of that. To know enough of the world to know what to expect. To not feel helpless. To, I suppose, not be helpless.

"I know many people and I could go on but does that suffice to tell me if 'flourishing' is translating correctly?"

"I think it's translating correctly," says Tarwë, though he purses his lips slightly at the hair-braiding part.

"And are we unusual, in all being unable to flourish in Vanda Nossëo?"

"I don't think you're unable to flourish in Vanda Nossëo. I think your - frame - might be wrong? I think people who get some of their needs securely met find that they are better able to compromise about some of the others. That sometimes feeling the need to have people be afraid to harm you is really just about needing to be safe, that sometimes people really are just tired and afraid and hungry and solving that makes some of the other things that seemed to be bothering them not come to mind so much, and seem irrelevant when they do. - Have you heard about Nelen's people, red-haired Amentans -"

"That people thought they were disgusting and did something to solve that? Yes but I haven't studied it in so much detail as to be confident I know how it's relevant."