"It might catch up to you eventually but yeah it'd take a long time."

"And by then we'll know enough to just go to some planets!"

"If you even have any others."

"We have stars. I will have to ask Varda if any of them have planets, but it doesn't sound urgent."

"The Valar have specialties?"

"Yavanna is plants and ecosystems, Varda is stars, Manwë's in charge, Aulë is metalworking and mining and engineering, Ulmo is the sea, Melkor is the one who tortured everything within reach until the others arrested him, Oromë is hunting and Tulkas is war and Mandos is the keeper and restorer of the dead and Nienna is mercy and Vaire is fate and Nessa is dancing and Estë is healing and Lórien is dreams and Vána is life and renewal and youth."

"...do you even have wars?"

"Just the one, against Melkor. I suppose Tulkas is bored most of the time."

"If things come up that don't fall into a specialty what do they do?"

"Get a new specialty or handle it badly."

"Ah."

"They mean well." Sigh.

"Look, I like you but there is this atmosphere of vague threat and it's disconcerting."

"I am aware! But we can't try hiding this from the Valar because your Emperor sounds like a morally bankrupt catastrophe of a whatever-species-you-are. I don't want anyone to get hurt. I really, really don't. But I have as much control over the Valar as you have over your Emperor and neither of them care very much about innocent people."

"You've got a really one dimensional view of the Emperor."

"Unless someone denies what we heard about Voa that's sufficient for my conclusions. Nothing justifies the mass murder of innocent unarmed people many of them children."

"They knew the terms - I'm not a political scientist -"

"You don't need an advanced degree to concluding that lining up families and slaughtering them is bad and that people who do it should not be in power."

"It's complicated." Something something game theory deterrence.

"It's not complicated."

"It's more complicated than you're making it sound."

"But you can't explain."

"The Voans could have surrendered."

"And then they would not have been murdered?"

"Yes."