"I will have to check if there are any loopholes by which one can accumulate so many titles they acquire the government!"

"Ooh."

"I would tell you it's not as much fun as it sounds but I'd be lying, it's exactly as much fun as it sounds."

"Don't worry, I won't steal your government, if I ever want one I'll go form my own."

"All these lovely worlds to go and do it in!"

"Precisely!"

He hops down from the perch looking up on Angband. This lands him very close to Cor. "Sounds like a better hobby than collecting astonishing titles, if you ask me, but if there happen to be too many worlds to save to carve out the time to rule any you can always drop by here."

...Cor has to crane his neck a bit to make eye contact but doesn't step back. "That's good to know."

He smiles at him. He sits down. 

This makes it substantially easier to look at him.

That was the idea, yes. 

"...so, why are the flowers here edible?"

"In Valinor all the flowers were edible! It was one of the genuinely nice things, actually, if for whatever reason civilization wasn't working out for you you could easily wander and get enough to eat. Not many of the plants survived the destruction of Valinor's lighting system and our subsequent efforts to transfer them to Endorē, which also didn't have lighting yet, and then once the sun rose it turned out Valian edible plants don't tend to compete well with local, non-edible plants. So no luck in having a 'abandon civilization and eat flowers' backup option here, but if you're going to take care to cultivate them then they come out fine. Eventually we were going to see about songs to aid them in growing in a wider variety of environments, but - after the war."

"Makes sense."

"There are a lot of things we've been putting off until after the war."

"It's the sort of thing that displaces long term plans."

"Yes." Sigh. "Or consumes them."

"Uh?"

"You have things you can't abandon for the duration of the war, so you go ahead, but they still end up - war-shaped."

"I can't say my more limited war related experience included much of that."

"It might be a problem with the centuries. Or with my species. Or maybe you're just particularly hard to budge in who you are."

"Or all of the above, we'd need more information to be sure."

"I am very curious but perhaps not curious enough to put a kingdom of immortal humans through four centuries of endless war. They would be so very annoyed with me afterwards."

"And throughout, I assume."

"Maybe that's Eru's mysterious unclear motivation, maybe he's a startlingly unethical social scientist."