"Clever."

He smiles. "And you've met the reason why. Well, the reason in general, not the reason in particular--Odette would be dead if she had been born anywhere else. I can keep my colleagues' attention away from my city. Not so for anywhere else."

"What about the status quo are they trying to protect specifically and why?"

"A large part of it is that they like having more power over others than they would if Great Mages and magic in general were more common. I...also believe that they may have...philosophical objections, to some of the implications of a more magical world."

"Oh?"

"...Do Elves have the...tendency to assume that because a thing is, and always has been, that it is correct and good for it to continue to be?"

"...the tendency exists."

"Death is...something that's difficult to deal with. The tendency is, ah, a popular coping mechanism."

"Mmm. We don't hold that people have to be alive, if they don't want to."

"Yes. Before five hundred years ago...we--I and several others who were like-minded--were working towards--improving the world. Making mages more accessible to everyone. We had some successes. Many of them did not survive the--transition. Rates of magical de-aging have plummeted in the last five hundred years. Some did; it's currently all but unheard of for disease to be fatal, or for that matter more than a minor irritant."

Nod.

"So I'm concerned as to how the other Great Mages would react to Valar, and how Valar would handle that."

"It would... surprise me if they could inconvenience the Valar themselves very much, but Vala power works best in places they have invested themselves in so they might be able to stymie them here."

"And I would like to prevent that, if possible."

"Yes. What do you think their reaction to contact with powerfully magical aliens would be?"

"I expect it rather depends on the context," he muses. "This is not, you understand, a possibility that has come to mind before...the worst case scenario, off the top of my head, would be to attempt to magically prevent anyone from your world from being in this one and decrying them to all and sundry as incomprehensible horrors."

"There are only three of these people, right?"

He shakes his head. "There were, five hundred years ago; there are two more now."

"What can they do, generally -"

"A great many things...it's very odd to be trying to describe this to one unfamiliar with magic. Transmutation, manipulation of objects, enchantment..."

"That's - vague. Valar can reembody the dead and communicate instantaneously with each other or Maiar and travel at the speed of light and duplicate physical items and oblige architecturally implausible structures to stay up and prevent animals from reproducing beyond the carrying capacity of their environment and once one of them made someone's fingernails invulnerable."

"Our capabilities are very broad. Do you know why the fingernails?"

"Someone complained about her nail polish chipping."

"Huh."

"They'd be more thoughtful before doing something like that these days but the recipient seems fine with it."