"It's interesting that the premise here is that I am in fact so awesome that given an Elf lifetime I could fix a set of Valar."

"They were always well-intentioned, just - missing some skillsets."

Shiver.

"They called everybody together for a stupid fucking festival so there were no Ainur on hand and nobody near enough to sing healing competently when Aydanci died, what skill deficit is that?"

"Treating the problem as 'people are unhappy' instead of handling what they're upset about, assuming Valinor's safer than it was - you could ask Ambela to break down how she did it, I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you -"

"Mmhm."

"If it were me I think I'd go talk to a couple thousand people, on the grounds Melkor can't do that many effectively, I don't know what the equivalent is for you..."

"Isn't really one. And talking to people never convinced my Maitimo, either."

"They'd all have been people he knew before, right?"

"Most of 'em, not all."

"Would he have told you if he thought it was likely real?"

"No. But the implied things it makes sense to do don't change much with exact probability."

Nod.

"How many hallucinations does this make?"

"Am I supposed to count this as the same one I was in when suddenly a bar?"

"Either way, I guess."

Kib counts on his fingers. It takes him a while. "...hundred and sixteen, most of which don't involve 'yes you were in Angband but now you aren't any more' at any level of commitment to realism. They're short. Can only keep me awake so long in real time and I dream if I sleep in a hallucination, too, after the first few they all start with 'hey guess what Macalaurë has a new sleep-skipping song!' and then if I'm busy enough it'll take a couple weeks before I start missing the Aly dreams, or feeling under the weather enough that I try sleeping it off..."

He flinches.

"What?"

"I don't know what I was expecting but that's more than I was expecting."

"That's not even counting separately all the ones that rewind a dozen times in a hundred places because nobody but Thuringwethil can play Aydanci worth half a lentil and even she needs a lot of tries to get better than caricatures, and to correct all the other slips."

"Does that mean we should fetch him? So he can be convincingly him and you can verify there weren't any restarts..."

"You clearly have something new in play here with the truth potion."

"Oh, Timothy can outright do mind control, he should really demonstrate."

"I am not sure that'd help."