" - no, you really shouldn't. We're trying to destroy it."

Nod.

"It's the One Ring. Sauron designed it to let him control all the others - it's impossible to give up once you have it and it tempts people in proportion to how much they want -"

Very small whimpering noise.

" - I can, uh, place guards -"

"That might be a good idea."

- nod. "Destroying it is our best prospect of defeating Sauron. Uh. Without creating something worse."

"I see."

"People've tried - it can't be used safely, it changes what you want even before you put it on -"

Shiver.

Nod. " - so. Ah. I read the lady Galadriel's message -"

"- yes. Uh. I don't know what she put in the letter -"

"That you're from - another world where the Valar were maybe more competent to start with and had a larger and more technologically advanced cohort of Elves to help teach them, something you do personally, and none of the - none of the later horrible things happened at all -"

"Right. Ah, and a few decades back we learned that Eru is principally motivated by constructing moving tragedies and is simply too unbound by perceptive limits temporal or physical to find ordinary narratives compelling, so he sets them up with real people, and ours was convinced to stop that and shrink to the point that he could just read books, so now all our lives are unencumbered by this tendency but our media is aggressively depressing, and I now strongly suspect that I am here because I will make really interesting faces if placed within forty feet of the Ring but that I may also be allowed to do other productive things."

"Well. That is certainly additional reason not to put it on, at least - what - what an explanatory series of events." Sigh.

"Yes."

"She said she told you our history."

"Yes. We have more people than you - most of the key figures up to a point are in my world too but you seem not to have a me, among - other differences."

"It'd make sense for you to have all of us and then some additional people. 

I am glad they're happy somewhere."

Nod. "- I like your music hall."

"Thank you."

"Let me know if you ever feel like learning some aggressively depressing songs would be a good use of time. - anyway, my long-game strategy would look like going to your Valinor and telling your Valar all the things mine already know, which has the disadvantage of potentially taking several yéni and leaving you with a pleasingly fixed world only after the war has done more damage than it has already. There may be something more immediately useful, though."

"Something more immediately useful would be nice - though I suppose if you're sufficiently confident you could fix everything eventually -"

"- eighty percent? It worked once but the conditions are different here - I might have to begin by teaching them physics, depending on what was going on with your world having been flat initially - I suppose it could go faster if they turn out to be capable of communicating directly with my Valar, or, less outlandishly, cut it down by parallelizing with help from any sympathetic parties available to talk to Ulmo while I work on Nienna and so on, but since these Valar have had more - distressing experiences - it may be harder to elicit sympathy correctly or convince them to reverse decisions they see as already made - and I do not think I can open with the revelation about Eru and will be less sincere in some of my arguments if I don't begin from a position of actual bewilderment about him - but they mean well and I did it once."

"And do you think that would do anything for - people who were captured by the Enemy in the meantime, or have been already -"