He hasn't commented at all yet. We asked them and they thought it might be the case that he wouldn't have let his Nelyafinwë have a Milliways door if he was not at least - open to - whatever interesting effects that might bring. So hopefully we can talk him around to our plan.

Makes sense. Do you suppose that optimism should reasonably extend to any world we can access via the forking trick and Milliways?

I think so. It doesn't seem like our Eru knew about all the other worlds, so it seems like the same can be assumed of other Erus. and once they know there is a world where their - original script - has played to completion maybe they will be all right with the other ones going differently. It might be harder with Erus who like ours were doing something original to begin with. Do you want to ask Bar how many Ardas are one-offs?

It'll only be a lower bound, but sure -

She goes, she comes back. She can identify one million fourteen thousand seven hundred ninety which seem to her plausibly unique.

Okay. So those ones might be harder to interfere with. It might be that a problem would be as overt as "when we try to open the door to that world, it refuses to open" or it might be that we would make some progress and then experience some sort of tragic, dramatic reversal of fortune. That seems like a concern in all worlds we try to contact - willingness to go off script does not mean willingness to abandon hurting people for their stories.

Okay. I'm glad you're finding the local Valar friendly; thank you for the update.

Of course. 

I think Cam is curious what would have happened if he'd gone there first.

Pause.

They think they could pretty finely affect his powers - moreso than we could, actually, we were braced to survive and fix a black hole but we didn't actually have a way to prevent one - and without understanding how you could work for Melkor without sharing goals with him, they would probably have made his magic stop working and held him in Lórien while they tried to understand what all this meant. Oh, and offered to let him go if he agreed to them changing his mind so he thought it'd been a wrong thing to do, we're explaining to them why that's a bad idea. And they'd have put the other Valinor back - they might have needed to rescue and consult their local alts first, they really really don't understand any physics - and their first thought would be to interdict summoning again, but as soon as someone pointed out mortals needed it, they agreed that making daeva powerless near Valinor was a less intrusive way of achieving what they wanted, I think they would have landed on that even without understanding things better.

And then they'd have spent Years trying to figure out what to do because of not understanding urgency. And given Cam the run of Valinor once he seemed to be visibly suffering from containment to Lórien, they think - they're confused about what demons need and so are we -

That's better than he'd feared, thank you.

They parole Melkor because they think even with everything he did, there ought to be some hope of redemption. They are very confused about how to do justice but they're trying - I think maybe after long enough we get there even without your help, but I'd expect it'd take ten, twenty thousand Years...

I have no idea where we'd be at that point, did you find any Ardas that far along when you were looking?

Yes, we mostly give up on meddling in Endorë once all the Maiar inclined to do evil there are at last contained or destroyed, and ignore it entirely, and eventually everyone is reembodied except Fëanáro and some of his children - by their preference -

Their rather circumstantially constricted preference, I imagine -

I think so, but it looks like it will be complicated to retrieve them even if we try it. 

Right. We can start with more urgent less complicated targets, perhaps.

There are, it appears, no shortage at all of those.

And she reports on the friendliness of the local Valar to those assembled.

He hugs Cam. "Leave him in a forest? Am I missing something?"

"Lórien's - friendly. It adapts itself to whatever will be most - conducive to your wellbeing, as it can estimate it - at the moment. It's nice if you're stressed and want to wander through a forest encountering picturesque hidden valleys and secret waterfalls and exactly the right concentration of cute grazing animals, it'd be obnoxious as a sort of halfhearted punishment."

"That sounds a little more full-featured than ours, which I can enjoy for about two weeks if I have company along, so Cam would presumably go stir-crazy in a few days without the ability to even make himself a book."

"Which one assumed they would anticipate, however incompetent." Sigh. 

"Valar don't really get bored. Or get boredom."

"Are this Arda's Valar about typical for level of suck?"

"For this point in the timeline, yes. This was a typical Arda of the most common type. The Valar later get - not exactly inherently worse but they rack up some terrible mistakes."