"Correction?" asks a yellow.

"You know, like, if someone has an impulse to steal things, they should go to Lórien and Irmo will make it so they don't have an impulse to steal things. And if they have an impulse to steal things and kept stealing things and didn't agree to go to Lórien - we don't force people to go to Lórien, you have to choose it willingly, but we might exile that person or make them have a minder or something - anyhow, if they then died, Mandos wouldn't resurrect them until they agreed to getting corrected. Or if someone sexually desired children instead of adults, things like that."

"That sounds useful."

Nod. "Endorë doesn't have that and they have more crimes and unhappy people and so on."

"Endorë?" (They have an accent; it comes out like 'Entorë'.)

"The world where the Elves awoke. We lived there during the war with the Enemy and then the Valar stopped him and invited us to come live in Valinor and we accepted because they were very great and we desired to learn from them."

"So you've had lightleapers for some time?"

"Oh, no, the Valar made huge beautiful ships and ferried it all the way - it's six of your years at lightspeed. We haven't been able to go back and forth until very recently."

"Oh. And people still live on Entorë?"

"Not everyone wanted to come live in Valinor. If we invite your people to Valinor will all of them want to come?"

"I doubt it."

"So like that. And there are orcs and Dwarves on Endorë, and they're not allowed in Valinor."

"What are those?"

"Other species." Pictures are pulled up on a computer. "Orcs and Elves don't live together well because they're really not pretty enough."

"You seem to... care a lot about... whether things are pretty. Do we need to filter people who may come into contact with you -?"

"If they looked like orcs that would be a bit of a problem. In Endorë's Elf kingdoms they have the orcs wear facial veils, I think. We'll probably build our own little place here and it'll be utterly stunning so it doesn't matter too much what the visitors look like."

"I don't think any of us look quite like orcs but people are more and less - symmetrical, smooth-skinned -"

"- it would be dishonest to claim it didn't matter, but it sounds like this world has lots of problems and it would grieve us to be delayed in aiding you by finding someone important or capable too ugly to look at, and there are technological solutions on our end, so we'll probably just work on getting those deployed."

"Technological solutions -?"

"It seems like it shouldn't take too long to design a VR blessing for it."

"What is a blessing?"

"Our thoughts are written to a chip in our heads, which is then backed up in Mandos, that's how we're resurrectable. You can load all kinds of things onto the chip that increase memory, attention, senses, reflexes, anything affected by the brain. We also have a related industry for things not affected by the brain. A blessing could be written that would, for example, blur out the faces of people in front of you -"

"Oh, I see. In the meantime we can ask people to try to look their best or bring scarves - and there's no reason you'll need to talk to a red caste person about anything, I think, and most of us are uncomfortable enough around them ourselves -"

"Are they unusually ugly?"

"We don't usually think about it in those terms."