"You read anything potentially helpful?"

"Not really. The Flat Arda version has parallels to everything."

"What's the deal with the Silmarils?"

"I'm unclear on what the Flat Arda ones do but the space ones were supposed to get backups without Mandos's intervention."

"And either way there's the same set of wars over them. Weird."

"I suppose the Flat ones could do the same thing, they never come into play as anything but shinies."

"Soul-collectors? Anyway, the Valar don't actually do anything punitive after the war in either of these accounts of it - including against Melkor's lieutenants, for that matter -"

"But the ones we might be consulting haven't got the Doom out of their systems."

"Yeah. I don't think it's worth it. We'll find something better."

Flop. "So what, aside from the usual constraining factor of evil intent, do you need to cast the Imperius on somebody, and do you think you can convince Theodore's alt's grieving pet Maia to be a test case?"

"There's a range limit, it works on all the sapients in my world and if it doesn't work on Maiar I'd expect it to be either because they are magically resilient to mind-affecting magic in some way - but there's no mention of that, they can make oaths, so that doesn't seem likely - or because they have too much mind or too strangely-structured a mind for me to do anything with it. I don't know if they need to currently have an embodied form. I could cast it on someone invisible if I knew exactly where they were. A bunch of things - how much attention I'm spending on it, how directly I have to be controlling things, how easy it is to throw off - seem to improve with practice."

"And you don't know if you can convince him?"

"I am not overwhelmingly optimistic. Could maybe find a Maia test subject in the flat Arda, assuming they're the same sort of thing."

"They might seem it and not actually be."

"Are there other Maiar in Endorë who might agree -"

"The other one I met was Sauron. Who is possibly a bigger creep than that one creep."

"Not in itself disqualifying."

"Well, he's not going to agree, but I don't object to attacking him, but he might warn Melkor if you can't hold him."

"They have faster-than-light communication?"

"Yep. Not for general purpose but between Ainur."

"Interdimensional?"

"...I doubt that but it hasn't been checked."

"Might be easier to convince someone to do a voluntary test of that."

Nod. "What does that get us?"

"Don't like bringing him here, even with the oath as thorough as it is, but the chip Elves think they can get portals eventually."