"I tried that. It was expensive."

"You have the magic ring that can travel between planets, what does expensive even mean to you -"

"I sold some Dwarves a planet like this one and now I'm in the black again after having paid off all the damage you did, which I was responsible for because it was my bright idea to put humans on Endorë. I can do that again. I can do that several times, even. But planets will get cheaper as more of them are sold, and my time gets more expensive as I learn to do more things. I am the only person right now who can resurrect dead humans - the Valar haven't even got that figured out yet - and I consider it deeply expensive that I don't currently know how to do that without abandoning a bunch of you on an otherwise uninhabited world to prey on each other for fun or impose unchecked costs on your nonhuman neighbors who don't have any system in place to discourage it. You don't have any dead loved ones, fine, some people do! Lots of people do! I want to bring them back and it is expensive not to be able to do that responsibly!"

"You could also use the magic ring to not pay your bills."

"Then the next time I want people to extend me credit I'd have to use it again, and when I need the market to produce capacities it doesn't have yet I'd have to micromanage that, and it would generally be super annoying."

Pirate shrugs. 

"Look, what would a society that did arrest you for piracy have to do to you once they arrested you to get you to cut it out and give sailing lessons or something."

"They'd cut off my hand. But that'd also kind of rule out sailing lessons."

"Any other ideas?"

"Uh, places have stocks? Places have prisons? What kind of people are you -"

"We're very law-abiding and regard prison as inhumane torture. Maybe I will just go resurrect Elros and ask him."

" - okay."

"Try the little white berries, they're great." She steps back through the portal and closes it. She goes and finds Elrond.

"Ambela!"

"Hello! The ring thinks I can resurrect humans now and I was going to start with the ones the living ones on Endorë miss but they're - not integrating in a way that I think scales well. Do you suppose your brother would have advice?"

"Probably. It is what he did with his life, after all, building a kingdom of Men."

"Does he need to appear in a Lórien too, do you suppose?"

"Humans are fairly resilient. I bet you'd be fine waking him up most places."

"Here? Now? I have left a pirate who was tickled that no one on Endorë was willing to arrest her on an uninhabited planet and shouldn't leave her long."

Giggle. "Sure. Go ahead."

All right ring do your thing. No not your favorite thing this other thing.

Ring only pouts a little bit and then it stretches back across the centuries and plucks a mind from its deathbed and a body from its health and -

He looks like Elrond, of course. He blinks. "Did you really -" he says to Elrond.

        "- I didn't do anything, really, these mad aliens came along and had it all worked out. You'd have woken up sooner or later even if I had nothing to do with it."

"- but you had something to do with it -"

        "They need someone to rule humans!"

"Did something happen -"

        "To Númenor? Yes. Eru destroyed it. It endured nearly four thousand years - that's not bad, really, for a human civilization -"

"I wish you would drop the qualifiers!" And he hugs his brother.

"I don't think your humans will appreciate being handed governance," he says to Ambela after a few more minutes of stories exchanged.

"Well, what they're doing now is working okay in some cases and not in others."