" - oh, we have not checked this yet and might be able to interdict it without interdicting summoning altogether, but - naively a daeva could probably put the summoner in a coma, steal chips, return to their native dimension and reembody their prisoners there."

"...yes that is very scary."

"We have summoning working right now to let all the Dwarves try it once, then we are going to make it stop working again until everyone is very thoroughly informed."

"That sounds about right. ...How unusual is your competence -"

"We are still reading but in addition to Melkor getting paroled it seems like the bad tail end includes Ardas with mass mind control to keep the population docile and the middling range involves not only paroling him but taking fifty Years to fetch him again. And at one point in many Ardas there is an invasion of Valinor and the local Valar ask Eru for aid and he blows up the planet the invaders are departing from, population of ten billion or so, no backups."

"Are there any Ardas more like this one -"

"Presumably. It did not take them that much reading to find this one, filtering on 'did not pardon Melkor'. We will inquire after other Ardas with the Oath Reform Act of 1400 instead of the Parole of Melkor of 1400 and try to follow up with those ones first."

Nod. "Does the arbitrary material object power work to resurrect people who weren't backed up?"

"If they have chips, yes. Not the people on the planet of Númenor, which is the one Eru destroys in some timelines, we don't have a way to get any of them back yet. But there are a lot of magic systems, there is probably something somewhere that can do it - 

- the Bar does not contain other publications from societies with an Oath Reform Act -"

"...are the Ardas on the same schedule, they could just be coming up on it -"

"The Ardas are on wildly disparate schedules and they very well could."

"Is the destruction of the Valinor the war crime you had in mind - I'd been guessing that was a Melkor but you didn't actually say, was it not - since apparently some Erus destroy planets -"

"Melkor asked it of a demon that had been summoned to that world, in exchange for a peace treaty."

"A treaty? But - oh, without the oath reform - oh."

"Yes. We have spoken to the demon and are satisfied that he is not a threat to any world he finds in less desperate straits, but it would be beneficial to have a process for putting that sort of situation on the public record and reassuring everyone - and doing right by those who were wronged - and there are going to be a lot of cases like that, Melkors delight in setting societies at each other's throats like that."

"Has anything about the discovery of other worlds cast doubt on the security of the local Melkor's containment -?"

"There are probably magic systems out there somewhere which could be used to break him out. We are considering solutions short of not letting any extradimensional magic work here at all, but that is the solution in place for the time being."

"That'll complicate immigration as a solution to otherworldly problems, I imagine if people are accustomed to having magic they don't want to give it up."

"Lots of worlds have no magic, or the vast majority of their citizens have no magic. But yes, it would. We are regarding the current situation as unstable in many respects.

...one of those respects, so you know, is that in standard Arda timelines the house of Fëanáro commits a fairly impressive array of atrocities. We don't know if they know this yet, and we don't know to what degree they would endorse the actions of their alternate universe versions - it was with unreformed oaths, and our alternate universe versions are pretty dreadful..."

"What precisely is the nature of alternate universe versions - if they do such different things how is the line drawn -"

"The bar in Milliways identifies them. They seem to be the same people modulo circumstances, but some people are changed quite a lot by their circumstances."

"It's some sort of natural category, okay. Are there future events in other Ardas that still seem worth worrying about here despite our irregularity?"

"Don't think so. Most Erus have created aging sapients here by now but I don't think ours is planning to at all, and if he does we will not make the mistake of refusing to fix the aging thing, telling them we could fix the aging thing, and waiting for them to be talked by Sauron into invading Valinor. Fëanáro and company steal a lot of lightleapers - ships that can get to Endorë in five days - and kill twenty thousand people when they do, but that was because no one was letting them leave and Melkor was loose, if they are allowed to leave and Melkor is not loose it seems unlikely. They also swear a series of unwise oaths over a set of chip backups Fëanáro secretly makes, I don't think ours has even made a set of secret chip backups...."

"...well, if he has, at least it's harder here to swear unwise oaths over them. Okay."

"Off to Tirion?"