"...no."

She looks at Curufinwë. "Your grace. Melkor dead, Sauron dead."

        "- yes, both."

"Are people going to die if we don't fix the - magical byproduct problem today."

"There's evac in progress but it's bottlenecked - the planet is still habitable in many places and should remain that way for months, maybe a few years -"

"Okay. That's all just to make sure you're at the right level of escalation. People who are just made up of their bodies can be resurrected, so preventing anyone from dying is important but less critical. Melkor and Sauron are - bad news -"

       "We noticed -"

"And also can do bad things with interworld access if we don't immediately handle them."

      "This is a recurring problem?"

"Ohhhh yeah. Nine of them now. Ardas are a theme. There are variations on the theme. You're a low-tech one, I can tell by the outfit - you're not genderswapped, I can tell because it's you - uh, were your Valar super into mass mind-control."

      "Yes."

She kind of freezes.

"Is that not, uh, typical?"

" - no it's not it's a variant. Um. - you're from the world that's in a state of emergency, right?"

"Yes."

" - we will. Handle that first. What's the population, what's the nature of the magical byproduct -"

"The world population was about a billion before our recent horrifying war, there were millions of casualties in that and in the magical byproduct disasters. Doing my magic requires being attached to a disposal site where destruction is dumped, annihilating both matter and space; we thought it was proportional to spells done but it turns out they start growing - or shrinking, depending on how you look at it - on their own past a certain point. There are some holes in the planet and gravity has noticeably fallen."

"Annihilating space meaning that you can't just - fill the holes?"

"That might stop them from getting wider if you dumped enough stuff in. Constantly."

"Are you evacuating to the Arda or somewhere else -"

"To the south continent, yeah, but they're not very dug in if you have a way to do something else."

"We could just get you your own planet, yes, find or terraform a nice one and move you all there and set it up with infrastructure. Who should we talk to about that?"

"Uh, me or possibly the Setup Volunteers."

"All right. Would you like to come back with me to Ambaróna for the onboarding process and to help us set up a good planet for evacuation."

"Sure. I'm Curufinwë's ride home -"

" - he can meet his alternate universe versions and get caught up on modern technology. If that's all right with you -"

     "Sounds great. What's wrong with my Arda -"

"I will look that up and get back to you."

      "...ah huh."

"Should I be concerned?"

"There is some cause for concern."

"What, do the Valar come over and mind-control everybody even people who don't live in Valinor -"

"No. We think the Enemy is unusually subtle, too, and people who never went to Valinor plus all the ones who did end up - way more fucked up than the normal versions. Usually when we find an Arda we just give his grace's family access to everything and -"

       "I don't think the Valar fucked with us enough to make us untrustworthy."

"They did."

"Who's we, anyway?"

"The interdimensional organization I work for. I work for a Maitimo but mine doesn't have a sex slave. And, like, wouldn't, because he is not evil."

"He, uh, cut it out with the sex slave thing."