"I don't know if there were genuine escapees of Angband but sometimes he did let people go."

"Those either. Orc-ancestors and uploads. Or one and then the other."

Sigh. "Anyway, the two hosts of Noldor sat on opposite sites of a conveniently positioned lake and glowered at each other and eventually Fingon had had about enough of it and needed a tractable Fëanorian and broke into Angband and rescued him. And he was in fact mad, and grotesque to look at and desperately unhappy, but he was still better at diplomacy than any of the rest of them -"

"- you're going to need to use Quenya names if you don't want me to ask who everyone is but from context I assume Findekáno."

Nod. "Thingol banned Quenya when he found out about Alqualondë. It was a terrible overreaction but - to a terrible tragedy which everyone else was just pretending hadn't happened at all, so people found his overreacting more sympathetic than - all the pretending -"

"Banned Quenya. My word." Sigh.

"Anyway. Maedhros surrenders the crown and apologizes for the ships - which he'd tried to prevent, he said, though I don't think we ever quite believed him because when he tried to get things he generally got them -"

"Depends."

"And then they besieged Angband for centuries."

"...okay."

"They were trying to invent something that'd let them take him but they couldn't do it in time. I lived in Doriath, Melian tutored me, she was the only person who maybe could have done it and then - and then the mountains on the northern range all erupted and killed everyone close, and the kingdoms folded, and the survivors fled, and one of them was this traumatized human boy who wandered into Doriath without reaching Melian's attention somehow and wandered into Lúthien and fell in love with her - and she with him -"

"Most of what I know about Lúthien is the music recordings she makes available."

"She was a - very sheltered, very talented, very sincere young woman, who erred the way I think royals often do where they take public goodwill as a bit of a moral imperative - not in the sense that one needs the trust of their people, in the sense that disagreeing with them about anything, or being anything other than precisely what they want you to be, is a betrayal of them - and Doriath wanted her to be naive and inspiring and blissful and irrelevant, and so she was, until she met him and wanted something badly enough to notice that she needn't be irrelevant -"

Nod.

"Thingol was furious. He told Beren he could marry his daughter if he came back with a Silmaril in hand - meaning, one presumes, to get him killed - and Beren went off to do that, and got captured, and Lúthien ran off after him - Thingol tried to stop her - and she ran to the Fëanorians, and they objected to the mission and when she couldn't be deterred from it imprisoned her - and Thingol geared up to go to war with them -"

"I hope you don't take it personally that I don't think very much of your world."

"Yours sounds lovely."

"Thank you." Sigh. "I was giving you its history - Fëanáro invented a lot of things in the absence of magic to invent them with, such as the printing press and the automobile - had what seem like the same seven children though you didn't list them all - calmed down considerably about his stepmother and half-siblings once Miriel returned to life - oh, and before that our chips were changed to prevent unauthorized forking, that was 1370, you wouldn't have an equivalent I suppose - over time Eru became more active, or perhaps I should just say talkative, most of what he concretely did was award the Valar additional powers -"

"Which they were responsible with?"

"Yes, they were, and he was doing it at the expense of his own, and after some scattered hinting it eventually transpired that he engineered the entire universe to be an entertaining tragedy but with sufficient shrinking of his omniscience he could just read books like a normal person and now he lives on the moon and judges poetry contests."

"Ah."

"A plausible scenario for what I am doing here is that I am supposed to explain incarnates to this set of Valar until they interrogate this Eru until he fixes his somewhat more extended and elaborate disaster, because it would be unaesthetic if he just did it one day of his own accord."

"You think Eru brought you here deliberately?"

"He at least allowed it. I can't rule out that it's for some other purpose, but the way his perceptive characteristics were explained it is in fact the case that not a sparrow falls without him cooing over how sad it is that nobody noticed and the possibility that he might resurrect it via exceptional miracle only to then coo over how sad it is that no one notices that. Certainly no one appears via snake monster without his approval."

"That puts some things in a new light."