"She's great."

"We are not totally sure if Midnight has noticed she's a Bell. He probably has but there has been no explicit acknowledgment of the fact." Sigh.

"Why doesn't he like Bells?"

"This was years ago - I wasn't even pealed then - they made a bad first impression on several levels, somewhat but not entirely for reasons that make sense from our perspective. A Bell didn't drop on that Arda, it was our alt Golden's daughter Elspeth. I don't know if she stopped by here on her way to fix your Valar."

"She did not - can I have summaries of all the people -"

"I could try appealing to Island but absent such appeals they're being petty about the pan-Maitimo enormous dossier of names etcetera. Midnight might have a more limited version he'd give you. The Bell version isn't nearly as conveniently organized for your purposes, someone would have to go through redacting things. Anyway, Elspeth had herself an Arda adventure and by the time those Valar sent her home to her folks she'd gotten the relevant Findekáno approximately free but he was hanging around to do policy things. The peal found the Arda. The last time they were about to kill a Sauron, they found he had a deadman switch. This time they checked - deadman switches are the sort of thing you threaten about if threatened, so they went and threatened Melkor - and it turned out that a consequence of Elspeth's adventure was that Melkor had been prepping to leave. He left. We're not certain where he is but a candidate is a world that sucks enough that we don't go there, we just evacuate it from outside its borders. Midnight was not impressed."

"Ah. Yes."

"And then another Findekáno decided that one needed a break and whisked him off, which Midnight has since referred to as the peal collectively kidnapping him. And there were various other miscommunications and it's been a huge mess and we've since transitioned somewhat away from storing all our organizational social competence in standard Maitimos, every now and then somebody makes some progress, but - it's not good."

"Where's his Findekáno?"

"Loki - who is a Bell - introduced him to a friend of hers and they decided to take a trip together off-map for the psychological benefit of being inaccessible even if we wanted to find them for some reason. They are expected back in, uh, Elf time."

...nod. "Are my alts useless around other bad people or is it specifically that I look like them?"

"Specifically that."

"It sounds like maybe they should get over it."

"And yet."

"I'm not clear on what you need from me."

"I'm wondering if you could accomplish anything Tireh hasn't if you went to Shadow."

"...maybe? What needs accomplishing from your organization's point of view?"

"This one time some evil brain slug aliens escaped their world, looked upon him as a fellow enemy of the peal and brought him goodies, and we're really lucky he didn't ride that alliance any farther. It was before Tireh's time but I'd like to be real, real sure that doesn't look like a viable strategy if any other such populations look for anti-peal help."

"There doesn't seem to be any way to knock you all off your perch without hurting hundreds of billions of people, no matter what the resources for accomplishing it."

"I'm also not confident that Tireh's equipped to notice if he does something that is genuinely a bad idea and tries slipping it past her."

"That, uh, does not seem like a good way to get him anything he wants in the long term."

"Should I be assuming he always acts in his own long-term best interest?"

"It'd be in character to conceal from you anything he was already up to which he doesn't want you to know about, it'd be in character to retaliate immediately against people who might have been deterred by that in situations where it doesn't escalate things, it'd be in character to acquire new capabilities and be responsible with them so that when you learn about them your reaction is mostly 'well, we wish he hadn't picked that up but he doesn't seem to be misusing it'. You can presume that he will not leave you in a position of thinking 'there really isn't a safe way to leave this person alive' or even 'there really isn't a way to have positive-sum interactions.'"

"We have sometimes wondered if there is a safe way to leave him alive. Not especially recently, but still. We don't like the concealing and sneaking around and the having to go 'well, we wish he hadn't picked that up'."

"I'm always delighted to meet new people."