"They will ask 'how did you not guess' and we will shrug and go 'it just wasn't obvious!'."

Squeeze. "I can't imagine letting people die when you had the cure, just because who knows how much lava's gone really..."

"Yeah. That was - yeah."

Sigh. Snuggle. "Someday we will never compromise on anything."

"I hope so." Snuggle.

They proceed with efforts to learn more about the Enemy for the less hurried second attempt. "How hard would it be to deoath someone remotely -"

"Not that bad? - Probably especially not if they're a Maia, I think, I can sort of make the artistic argument that the specific physical form isn't relevant and doesn't need painting, I'm doing a lot of that with the Melkor-zapping spell."

"Once you have a version of that that's the best we can do with current intel I have a Maia I want deoathed."

"All right, I'll start ruminating on that in the background."

Nod.

"Who's the Maia?"

He sends the name; it's long and unpronounceable. "Spoken version is 'Thuringwethil'. Does the Enemy miscellaneous favors but not one of his exactly. I think it'd be tolerable to spare her in exchange for cooperation, I don't expect she'd take that as license for any particular atrocities."

"Sounds good. Why does she do him favors?"

"I have no idea. Maia motivations are deeply strange - could be that he agreed to make the interior of Angband purple - or something equivalently mundane and irrelevant to us - if she'd occasionally torture people for him, could be that she finds it thrilling, could be that she swore she would a very long time ago..."

"...purple. Why are Maiar like that?"

"I assume we make as little sense to them." Sigh. "There are lots of Maiar, some have practically ordinary desires and preferences. Melkor's lieutenant is the worst person I can possibly imagine but he makes perfect sense. He really enjoys horribly torturing people and manipulating them into mass murder. He's evil but he cares about the same things as I do..."

"How do you come by this information?"

"Enemy doesn't teach orcs how to keep private thoughts, presumably so he can read them as much as he wants, but it means if we're close enough we can also."

"...great."

"I know. Over soon."

Nod.

"We actually always figured he'd just teach 'em privacy, once he caught on, but he seems not to have thought it worth it."

"No way to teach them privacy-except-for-him? Or verify when they're keeping things from him and punish them?"

"Could do that. He'd have to admit he's reading them but they're slaves, I don't know why he'd worry about that. I've wondered if orcs would actually have osanwë if taught about it properly, since it's strange in the first place that they don't. If that's the reason I can see why he'd want to avoid it."

"And none of 'em think about it properly?"