"Gonna want you to confirm orc translations - the language barrier probably means people who aren't you won't want to swear so I can understand -"

"Not until they've picked it up, at least, yeah."

"In theory, I could pretend words meant different things."

"It's the sort of thing we warn little kids about. Never ever ever swear anything in a language you're not fluent in."

"Yes, but as your sole source of information I could corrupt your understanding if I were an asshole."

"I don't think you could get it past me, honestly."

"Probably not. Etymology or something."

"If Maitimo thought you were an asshole then I might be doublechecking my word roots. But he doesn't."

"Based on what?"

"Oh, he just has uncannily good instincts for that kind of thing."

"Huh. Sounds useful."

"I can only imagine how the civil war would've gone otherwise, yeah."

"I am curious about the civil war."

"This was four hundred years ago. Melkor'd been paroled for - nearly a thousand? And he spent the time making a study of everyone in Valinor and how to cause as much of a catastrophe as possible when he made his move. So he started - planting evidence, starting rumors, shapeshifting and having suspicious conversations in earshot of people, managed to convince some people that my father, who was the King's heir, was planning to have them killed when he took power. My father barely knew they existed and all he ever wanted with power was to get us out of Valinor. But I don't want to be entirely unfair to them, they had convincing evidence - they took it to the King who told them they were safe, warned the Valar something was up but didn't know what -

- so they started planning to kill my father before he assumed power or overthrow him once he did. And that it was arranged that we'd hear about, so then we genuinely were worried about them, and so the false rumors could subsequently be supplemented with true ones. And when the King was murdered one of the paranoid people declared himself King and had some force to back it up with - and he had my father assassinated and there was fighting in the streets -"

"Did this person have some claim to the throne or just some followers?"

"King's son by a different woman. Legally no claim, but - not just random."

Nod.

"Anyway it looked like Melkor was going to get exactly what he wanted, thousands and thousands of people dead and none of us in any state to get to Endorë. And then the next morning we woke up to peace and pardons all around and a restructured chain of command and orders to get moving and it was over. Maitimo killed a total of twelve people."

"...surgical."

"About the best you could do, under the circumstances. They might even be back by now."

"Thought that was really rare?"

"Twelve in four hundred years is about the right amount of rare."

"Mkay."

"We don't have channels of communication with Valinor, they might not, I don't know. But they might."

"No channels at all?"