At a guess, they'll use it better and faster than you expected. Fëanáro's good at engineering. Terrible at leadership, but.

And we've still got magic up our sleeve if they decide to commit or end up oath-forced into more atrocities.

Magic that Maitimo knows about.

Still, unless there's some downside to giving them blueprints that I'm missing, we could use the boost. Too bad the agricultural machines probably won't help here.

I can't think of an obvious downside. It's not obvious to me that even if they could they'd storm our camp and force loyalty oaths at advanced-weaponpoint. they don't want our help that badly.

They think we're slowing them down, but not nearly enough to be worth doing that.

Plus it's not just them having improved tech or not. You're probably right about getting concessions.

How are we slowing them down, exactly?

Supposedly, us being here means defecting is a salient option so they have to tone down the culturally objectionable oaths. Usual caveats apply; for all I know it's actually just that they're wasting resources watching us.

Nah, I find it very realistic that we are acting as some kind of bound on how authoritarian Maitimo can be and how hard he can work his people. Surprised they'd admit to that being a consideration, though.

I was being what probably sounded like extremely open-minded about the oaths, maybe that's part of it.

Clever of you. I probably would have freaked out, it's - not dangerous in itself but the mindset that got Fëanáro swearing to kill whoever withholds a Silmaril....

I wasn't faking. The taboo exists for incredibly good reasons, but we know what those reasons are and can tell when they don't apply.

The mindset thing I didn't think of. But it doesn't seem like the same mindset? It's more like "can't get through the day without my coffee" than...whatever that was.

I think both mindsets are 'if the best avenue to my goals involves invoking incredibly powerful dangerous forces I will just thoughtlessly do that', but okay.

That part yes. At least, I don't trust they aren't ever doing it thoughtlessly. If it's the powerful dangerous forces that are the problem, just today we've invoked magic, Maiar, and capitalism.

Any of those do mind-control?

Well, capitalism has advertising.
Maiar maybe can?

And. Yes. 

Okay, point taken.

I just hope when someone slips up it's not badly.

I don't think Maitimo'd leverage the most catastrophic ways to screw up, I can definitely see him taking advantage of medium-catastrophic ones.

It's not as dangerous as it possibly could be.

Wonder if all the different local groups have the same background assumptions about oaths as you do. Yours make sense, but they're not the only set that could make sense.

Good question. Hard to ask without scaring people badly, though.

I can imagine. Worst-case it'd be like asking practitioners 'have you considered that demon summoning might be the right tool for the job once in a while,' —and suddenly it makes a lot more sense why everyone reacts like they do to using oaths instead of coffee.

That's a really taboo thing in your world?

Yup. Pretty much the most powerful magic there is, guaranteed to always be worse on net than not doing it but not necessarily worse for you, and while there may be cases where demons are the best answer you really don't want people approaching every question wondering if this is the one.

So, not the best impression to make.

That sounds similar to how people think about oaths, except there's no guarantee - worse on net by whose standards, the universes'?

As usual.

In this case the difference matters less than it might, because the demons are intelligent and can prioritize putting collateral damage where it hurts people.

Intelligent and, like, universally evil in the Melkor sense where they just like causing suffering?