"I am sort of not inclined to risk it on the grounds that he must be hoping for one of 'I murder the King' or 'the King ends up back in power' and not bringing back to life seems least likely to play into his hands. I might feel differently if I hadn't gotten all our internal divisions cleared up."

"...so the chip is a secret, or the chip is announced to be an Enemy trap...?"

"Enemy can say he gave it to us. You could say you tried checking it against some kind of conjuration and found we were being deceived. 

I don't like secrets that can blow up in my face this readily but I don't think we have much choice."

"Enemy could also say we are not being deceived," Cam points out, "and then I have to lie again about whether I can verify that."

"If you take this to my father he will want his father back and assume he can engineer his way around whatever the Enemy intended and tell you to do it. If you take it to anyone else they will either tell you 'I don't keep secrets from my King' or 'yes, obviously Maitimo decided that him ruling the Noldor was worth keeping Finwe dead for' and then lots of people will disobey me instead of just obeying me very bitterly."

"Enemy can't contradict me if I say I tried making a body around it and it didn't work."

"Let's go with that."

"Anybody going to catch me if I do very technical truths - received chip, made body, body did not display signs of not being a basement dweller -?"

"I can tell you're withholding something, but I really doubt anyone else would be able to - aside from being a better reader of people than most I've also spent more time around you."

"I am not a bad liar per se but I like having the fallback of 'okay but I did not speak any technical untruths and you may yet rely on me to avoid that'."

"I get the appeal. I underestimated how much of a challenge it is to be assumed dishonest until I started being widely assumed dishonest."

"Are you?" Cam blinks.

"Not by my people, obviously. But my people are only half the host. The problem is that 'what happened' is in general a splendid first approximation of 'what Maitimo wanted to happen' and what has happened for the last few years has been a series of escalating tragedies that ended with me in power. And we were for a long time operating on a very very need-to-know basis about our important capabilities...I swear to you I don't think I've done anything you don't already know about to particularly earn the reputation, I can't recall having lied to you and I would remember it, and I've kept you away from the people who don't trust me only because as a consequence of that mistrust I'm not doing anything particularly interesting with them.

Most of them trust me to win the war, just not that any particular sentence I'm speaking will be true."

"Sounds frustrating."

"Somewhere along the way I actually seem to have lost the capacity to be particularly frustrated by things that don't matter. People who want to frustrate me shall have to actually be getting people hurt, at this point. Now today was frustrating."

"Yeah, I do not feel like I won that conversation."

"The only leverage we have with someone as far as I can tell completely evil are various things that make him stronger."

"He said I can take Elves offplanet if I don't ask for oaths that they aren't his servants," Cam says. "I may be able to turn that into one batch of refugees safely if I verify them some other way - that's relatively easy if his servants are Maiar because naively conjuring a Maia gets fuckall, difficult but probably not impossible if I have to do something more roundabout - but he did not commit to this being his standing policy so I can't assume I can do it twice and can't assume he won't retaliate."

"Shapechangers are all Maiar, he might have Elves who he took prisoner and tortured into the wrong oaths though most Elves wouldn't give those oaths even under decades of torture and if he uploaded them he can't use them as spies anymore."

"Are orcs immune to plastic surgery?"

"No but it'd take a lot of it, we have very good vision...I suppose if his tech level's sufficiently far above what he claimed..."

"Demons don't have it as good as angels, and fairies have the fewest options but you can get a lot of mileage out of nothing but a really reliable healing ability, I look mostly like I did when I was human except the wings and tail but some people go in for extremes..."

"Valinor had very popular and very safe surgeries for improved senses, and obviously gender transition and things like that, but not much that was purely cosmetic. We're designed pretty anyway."

"Gender transition was not an 'obviously'," Cam says, "humans mostly got their heads on straight in that department after gay rights."

"I'd expect there'd be more prejudice in places where there wasn't a straightforward fix," he says, "though actually sounds like your daeva are a straightforward fix so we may just have to chalk it up to cultural differences..."