"- if you found out while Melkor was still around and refused to help I can imagine committing to hurt you if you didn't help."

Sigh.

Hug. Sigh. "I love you, Cor. I'm so sorry."

Hug.

"Do you have - plans that are independent of what I do next -"

"Demilitarize, start pressing on various social progress things, import and translate books that you or someone else recommends as - transmitting good values. Work out a more distributed chain of command now that we can afford it. Talk with Huan about maging to scout, send aid south."

"My world is not uniformly great on social progress either, it's just different and Gatesnest was cosmopolitan enough to do a sort of common-denominator thing."

"I'm not expecting it to be a panacea, just that - there exist books which would be a good influence if widely read."

"If they were - interpreted right, yeah. If people are going to read A Romance of Red Mountain and go 'wow, those people deserved the scorn of their community, it's a pity they didn't listen to their sensible advice to stop dating' - less so."

"Some of them might do so, it's weirdly sticky. We'll look into it."

"What are your more contingent plans like?"

"Uh. If you're going to be around it would be a horrible waste not to give you things to do - the interworld magic-collecting, once we have that to get working on, but we don't yet and there are some candidates for the interim - I think I promised you some titles - if you are going to leave, and I know of people who have a crush on you but have chosen not to tell you yet, would you like me to tell you or wait for them to -"

"Uh. That probably depends on stuff?"

"Well. If you want to leave do tell me contingent stuff and then you can leave with a list of more respectable admirers."

"A whole list, huh?"

"You're amazing, Cor." Sigh.

"I'm not accustomed to listsfull of people thinking so!"

"Maybe they just usually don't tell you!"

"I wonder why." He squeezes Maitimo. "I will stick around for the time being."

Squeeze. "I will find you exciting things to do. - I'm not bribing you, see, just avoiding criminal underuse."

"You may find me things to do, wouldn't dream of insisting otherwise."

"...what?"

"Just being delighted about you. As one does." He looks like he wants to kiss Cor and thinks better of it. "Do you want to do refugee stuff or demilitarization stuff or vet and teach mages or supervise teams that are classifying magic items we found in Angband -"