Sort of? I think it matters more if they're on their turf than if you are, like, Melkor and his Maiar are going to be hardest to kill if they're in Angband, but I guess they might have a hard time hitting back if you're all the way over here. His lordship is very low on the wanting stupid random stuff - he just wants horrible stuff, not stupid random stuff - and he's pretty fast for an Ainu, Melkor might not even react to you until you did some damage. Oh also Angband runs several times faster than the exterior world.

Hmm. Do magical songs work here, have you checked?

I have not! I should! I will check my water walking song when I am done with this tableful of amazing food.

Aww.

I'm glad you like the food. I'm proud of the food conjuration spells; I put in a lot of design work on them. My father is better at handling power directly but I'm better at spell design.

The food is great! I don't recognize most of it but it's so tasty! He says it doesn't have crickets though.

It does not have crickets. Would you like there to be crickets?

I'm used to them but I won't miss them all that much.

All right.

Hmm, things about gods...

What did you mean when you said it might not be possible to kill them?

They don't have to have bodies. They can, or they can have a bunch of bodies, or they can be a volcano - well, Melkor can be a volcano - but if you kill their body they just have to build another one, if they want one, or do without.

So they can't be killed by destroying their bodies, but there might be other ways. Destroying their minds directly, perhaps.

I'm not sure if the Valar tried it but they say even Elf and orc souls are indestructible and Ainur are probably less destructible than that.

Might have to come at the problem from multiple angles, then.

What ways can you cause someone who is a big problem to stop being a big problem if they can't die and don't need a body to act? Remove all of their memories? Perhaps move them very far away - do they still have locations when they are not using bodies?

Yeah. Sometimes several.

Several locations? Tricky.

They have way more attention than incarnates and can be a dozen places. Or as good as, borrowing senses or whatever.

Then moving them far away probably won't work. But destroying or interfering with their minds might.

Their minds are weird, not that much like incarnate minds.

It would be good if we had an example to work with but perhaps it is ultimately better that we don't. What might they be able to do to interfere with us?

I don't know if they can reach here. They can do a lot of stuff but I don't know exactly what makes a thing something they can do and not something they can't, or something they can only do at home. His lordship is very good at illusions and can do fully immersive hallucinations - he only even needs actors for crowd scenes or some personality types he's not good at pretending to be - they can mess with memories, add them not very fine-grained or delete them or put them back - they do a lot of fire and darkness type stuff but that could just be theming.

So they will need mental protections, probably, that's a place to start. Thank you.

You're welcome!

I'm glad you get along so well with my father.

And not just because it means he's probably going to stop torturing people as soon as it is feasible for him to do so. ...but substantially because of that.

Me too!

Please let me know if you think of anything else about gods that might be relevant. I hope you have fun testing your water-walking song.

I don't know what else is relevant?