"Prevent disaster and colonize space."

"And do you have specific plans for doing those?"

"I'm keeping an eye out for opportunities but the biggest threat and obstacle is the Valar and being impatient with them is counterproductive."

"Right, those, what's up with them?"

"They are gods and bad at their jobs and even slower-moving than Elves by default."

"In what sense are they gods, exactly, what can they do? They're apparently not omnipotent, but couldn't they be—talked into being good at their jobs or something? Because if there's something that's better than the end of material scarcity it's competent gods."

"There's an omnipotent one who is even worse at his job. I would love competent gods, believe you me, but the Elves are mostly pretty nice and have had tens of thousands of years and haven't gotten much of anywhere with them. I'm not totally pessimistic about a strategy involving talking to the Valar one at a time, since there are fourteen, but that requires a way of talking to them at all which doesn't freak them out, and unauthorized interaction with Valinor does that."

"—and how do you get authorization?"

"You don't, mostly, but they're considering having a resident demon to do correspondence."

"...this is extremely frustrating."

"You're telling me."

"And to kill time you're going on dates with random strangers?"

"You're not random, Elvis sorted my mail."

"Ooh, what were the criteria?"

"People he thought I'd like."

"I shall take that as a compliment."

"You should!"

"What did you do, after Revelation?"

"Taught summoning at the University of Washington."

"Oh, right, that's where you, er—died—"

"Yep. Traumatized my students."

"Was the why just—really disrupting his business? That sounds so petty when the thing you disrupted was material scarcity—"

"That was his stated motive, I don't know for sure that was it."

Sigh. "Anyway, what's on the menu?"

"Whaddaya want?"