"Which we cannot complain we were not warned about!"

"It's been rather a theme!"

"I am optimistic we'll get it figured out."

"Hope so!"

People come by to draw up a bath. 

"We have running water and we have hot water but we don't have hot running water," he says regretfully.

"We don't have hot running water either."

"Valinor did but we found the price a bit steep."

"I don't blame you!" He hops into the tub and starts scrubbing off dried blood and smears of ash, shorts and all. "I could also use clothes when I'm done."

"Melkor is the worst of the Valar - I wouldn't try to wield your magic to destroy the others even if it didn't have such awful costs - but none of them belong anywhere near incarnate peoples."

"Noted."

"They- " paroled  " -Melkor. See, a long time ago he captured and tortured lots of Elves and bred them into orcs and enslaved the orcs and bred other horrible monsters and ran around causing as much horror and suffering as he could, and so the Valar captured him and imprisoned him, and then after a while he said he was sorry so they let him out."

"'Paroled'," Cor supplies.

"They said they were keeping an eye on him but he planted a bunch of evidence of treason on the part of various parties in order to start a civil war and they didn't notice. They did notice when he killed the King and sacked the continent and torched our libraries and ran away with our most valuable magic treasures but by then it was a bit too late."

Nod.

"So you went and chased him?"

"This continent was lower-tech, one thing the Valar did was teach us science and we'd invented many things they hadn't. Orcs had overtaken it, were capturing and enslaving everybody. We didn't have the means to kill him yet - still don't, we're working on it - but we came here and took the continent back and -" besieged - "Angband and bought time. To find a solution. Which perhaps we now have, though it's itself a very buying-time kind of solution."

"Besieged. And yep."

"Leaving involved stealing a fleet of boats. The Valar were very angry about that. - I'm not in favor of stealing boats but we'd asked to buy or borrow them, and asked them to teach us how to build our own - they turned us down because of the mass" psychological conditioning to obey the Valar - "and if we'd gotten here a month later tens of thousands more would have been dead or worse."

"Psychological conditioning to obey the Valar." Clothes have appeared by telepathic suggestion. He gets out of the tub and gets dressed.

"The thing I previously mentioned, not an additional thing on top of that."

"I figured."

"We can give the boats back if it's ever safe to return to Valinor."

"Sounds like that might take a while."

"it's been three hundred years."