"You're allowed to do it for engineering, that's different. It's like how you can't be a soldier and a healer but battlefield medical magic is fine."

"If it's a matter of allowed then that seems like a really strong argument in favor of this being a stereotype."

"Yeah, maybe. I have a cousin who used to be amazing at math, when she comes back we can ask her."

"Same one?"

"No, actually. This is Fingon's brother's wife. She died on the ice, when their daughter was still a kid. Daughter's now nearing her half-millenium."

"Oh."

"I figured they'd have told you about that, when they were making the case for keeping my father dead."

"I knew a lot of people died on the ice. There's a difference between, 'hey, person who is working on resurrection, a bunch of people are dead,' and 'hey, person whose primary source of adolescent angst was that your grandparents missed seeing your mom grow up, this mom missed her kid growing up'."

"There are things resurrection itself can't fix. Gonna invent time-travel?"

"And do what, exactly? Erase the person her daughter grew up to be so her mother can be a part of her childhood?"

"I think if you asked every Elf on this continent for consent to go back and start over and know the things we needed sooner, you'd get a unanimous yes. Every year the war goes on, there's so much suffering."

"Well. Maybe. If anyone consents to it--I wouldn't do real time travel, that would be all sorts of problematic--but I could regress people. If they wanted. I'd put a wait on it, though. Make sure it's not the kind of thing someone can do without being sure."

"That I don't think anyone would want. It's not about living your life over, it's about ending this war sooner."

"Oh. I misunderstood. Time travel would--it would be really problematic. I would basically be killing every single person who's been born since then."

"Yeah. And every orc that's been basically sentenced to eternal torment."

"Do we know that they still suffer after they die?"

"The Halls of Mandos aren't fun for Elves. If you don't want a Vala poking around inside your head until he thinks you've been adjusted into someone who deserves to be alive, they're pretty awful."

"I don't know if I could bring someone back ever if they'd been time-traveled out of existence. Even if I can bring back humans someday."

"Didn't say you should do it. I'm not at all sure you should. I just - there's a reason we'd all let the last few centuries be erased, and it's not that they were bad, it's that this war should have been ended the second it was possible."

"Yeah. I don't think I'll be trying that. Now, if I happened to find another universe just the same as this one but a few centuries earlier..."

"Kill him right away. Actually, if you can save my father in time, do that, he'd have been smart enough to figure out how to win by now."

"Right. Save your dad, then tear Morgoth atom from atom."

"And then you can pop by and think very highly of me, and I'll be four hundred fifty years younger and stupider and both flattered and confused."

"I'll tell him it was the dog that did it," she jokes.

"Do Men like Maiar? My sample size is too small."