"....wow."

"I've been idly wondering if he could reach other worlds. Yours seems vaguely his style, if we take his style to be 'horrible tragedy carefully orchestrated over the course of millenia and redeemed at the last by great heroism', which - seems mostly right."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"Me neither."

"...no obvious angle to find out or fix it if so though."

"Not yet, no. And it's not really a reason to have different expectations about how trying to kill Melkor will go."

"I guess unless it can be done especially heroically somehow."

"I've occasionally wondered if he could be distracted from causing global tragedies by sufficiently compelling personal tragedy but you'd have to, uh, orchestrate personal tragedies to find out, and that seems like a bit much off the strength of idle speculation."

"A bit, yeah."

"He does seem to be pretty hands-off. I wouldn't bring it up otherwise." Sigh. "But if we find too many worlds of a similar theme I will probably worry in addition to handing out prizes for saving them."

"You think he's orchestrating them all?"

"I have no idea. If they all feature - millennia of buildup to horrible disasters involving mass death, and then some costly heroics to buy some hope - then I'd conclude he is. If they're mostly nice varied places with problems but not the kind of problem that is 'the magic we use to treat disease and travel freely slowly eats our planet alive' then probably he's restricted in scope and we can just leave this place and work on the problem from outside his reach."

Nod.

"Or maybe the answer to 'why does the world have an omnipotent god and look like this is that it doesn't and the Valar lied."

"Have they got a motive for that?"

"Not really. They were usually honest as far as they went, and they certainly believed themselves to be doing Eru's will. Asking them why Eru cared who people married, or whether they prayed, never got anywhere."

"Never got anywhere how?"

"They weren't very good at explanations and they still held to the rules in contexts where they agreed their explanations implied there was no concern."

"Ugh."

"It was obnoxious. I think I avoided having my head toyed with but I'd give a lot to be sure."

"You don't even know?"

Sigh. "So there were things I knew they'd tamper with - my opinion of them, for one - and whenever it might come up I would swear myself into an entirely different and I think unobjectionable set of beliefs, temporarily, and have my head back intact when it wore off. But doing that is so profoundly confusing that if they still found something worth fixing I don't know if they fixed it or how it would have withstood, uh, reverting into my ordinary head. And I'm only mostly sure I never slipped up with phrasing."

"Yikes. I'm sorry you had to go through that."

"I certainly don't miss it. Maybe somewhere there'll be magic to check and to reverse things for anyone who wants them reversed."

"Maybe so. And then you can be however you want to be."