"I'll do that. Thank you so much."

"You're welcome."

She goes upstairs.

Mitros pats him. 

Cam sighs.

"That wasn't even bad news - I get that you don't like thinking about it -"

"It's not bad news but - my god, they think I put killswitches in people in such a way that this calls their credibility into question."

" - I got the story from Iobel but I think I'm missing a bit of context on what they'd have observed and what they're assuming about it -"

"I guess they're piecing things together by conjuration. Which doesn't let them trivially figure out who the melters are locked to, although it would have let them find out that anyone who didn't already have a chip got one at the same time... uh, if the Enemy could take Elves alive or dead-but-with-intact-chips he could torture them. He could do it a lot in parallel - a majority of Arda's population was tortured people, different threads of them - he killed everybody in a city, took all their chips, I came up with the melters, rigged a couple cities to blow if they needed to -"

...he puts an arm around him. "So, absolutely necessary and probably the most valuable thing that could possibly be done under the circumstances but I'm sure it was horrible to be in circumstances where that was the best thing to do. And they - just saw that you'd rigged people to explode on the command of something, and figured -"

"In the amount of context they have it looks terrible, yeah."

"I guess that makes sense of why she was scared."

"Was she? I guess that makes sense."

"Yeah. Be easier if we could tell 'em about the Elves chips thing but I know we can't."

"They can check and find there are Elves on New Valinor, now. Not sure what they'll make of it. Excuse'd be the Silmarils."

Nod. "Does Larya know that's the excuse -"

"Yeah."

Blue liaison traipses upstairs and finds the room and knocks. A woman opens it. Black hair, outrageously beautiful, tall, dressed in a uniform that looks dreamed-up by an artist rather than employed en masse by a military.

" - hi. I'm so sorry to bother you, Campbell Swan thought you might be able to help me out. I'm Sanaih Asa, I'm the Ganymede Circling Police liaison to the Anitami colony planet of Timilan."

       "I have heard of none of those places," Larya says. "I'm Erdellë Larya. Do come on in."

In she goes. The room has been reupholstered and the furniture redone. There are abstract sculptures. There's an unnaturally pretty tapestry. "Sorry, I have no idea where to start - we didn't realize there were Elves in Milliways -"

      "It's just me, Cam thought it'd be a good idea so my world didn't lose access if something happened to him."

"Ah. My condolences on - recent events in your world."

       "It's over now. We're setting it right."

"Oh?"

        "Resurrecting everybody, negotiating trade agreements and everything to shore up the peace, resettling people, rebuilding..."

"- resurrecting everybody -"

         "- oh, Elves keep backups of our brains on chips in our heads. So if we die we can be resurrected. And we keep backups of the chips on a technology called the Silmarils, so if we're killed in a way that destroys our chips..."

"Oh."

       "They're trying to figure out how to chip other species but they haven't got it yet."

"Our scientists might be interested in that too."

       "Maybe your Fëanáro can collaborate with ours."

"Fëanáro?"

       " - you have a Maitimo, you presumably have his father?"

" - Aitim does have a father, I don't know much about - oh, yes, his father is the fellow who went green."

      "I would want a few of him on any important research project."

"Then I suppose it's convenient we apparently have a few of him. Swan's helping with resurrecting everyone?"

     "He's been doing it nonstop for half a year. Doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, nothing but resurrections."

"...he, uh, killed them all in the first place."

     "I know. He had to, to end the war. But he's allowed to put them back."

"...could I perhaps have a little more context on that?"

     "You know we were at war with Melkor?"

"I know the Elven nations were warring with the orc ones -"

      Larya is vigorously shaking her head. "No, no we weren't. The orcs were fine. We were at war with the Enemy, and he enslaved them and forced them to fight for his cause. You wouldn't have found that by conjuring, I suppose - Elves, orcs, and the Maiar and Valar in our world can make binding commitments. Chip-enforced in our case and magically-enforced in theirs. If you swear to something that's it, you'll do it, creates a very powerful compulsion and makes it impossible to care about anything else...the Enemy had orcs swearing him fealty as young children."

"Understood. I'm sorry."

      "Well, Melkor wanted the Valar dead. His rival gods. The only way to do it -"

"I see."

       "And he was torturing billions of simulated people on servers stretched across a continent and a couple of moons. Constantly. And we were losing the war."

"...I see."

        "So Cam got him to promise to stop and never hurt anyone ever again. And he - and now he's putting them all back."

"I think you might be able to solve my problem," Sanaih says.

Anitam approves transitioning the rest of their reds with angels. They're going to introduce robots once the reds are angeled, and will give them to other places that have angeled their reds also and promise not to share with anyone who hasn't.

How convincingly do they have to promise?

Do people still not get the concept 'aliens will start a war over this'.

Why would the aliens do that, though, do aliens like wars?

Some of them! Or like getting elected and have citizens who will be really upset about reds! Or want to have a larger empire and think their neighbors will give them a pass as long as they say it's about the reds!

Uuuuuugh why do aliens care so much about reds. They're reds.

The aliens will probably also intervene if some country decides to exterminate their greys or something but that hasn't happened yet.