Giggle. "Okay."

"And they seem very sad."

"Yeah. How's your alt doing?"

"He's also very sad but he can fix it by working hard and inventing better things and eventually he'll be okay."

"Okay. And how are you doing?"

"I am so so glad I have you."

"I'm really glad I can help you."

"Otherwise everything would be so awful."

Squeeze.

"Stupid evil everything. I wish I were smart enough. I should have been smart enough. I don't know why I wasn't smart enough."

"I don't think it's a matter of not being smart enough."

"If I'd been smarter I'd have been epic by then and could have killed a god. Even with our slow magic."

"Are you sure? It's pretty slow and I'm not sure how even in principle you'd kill a Vala with it, and there wasn't much warning he had that he'd want to kill one."

"He should have been smarter, should have guessed."

"Him and what hints? Intelligence lets you guess things with fewer clues but not no clues, and the fewer you have to work with the more things they might mean."

"Don't know. But it's even worse if there's nothing they could possibly have done..."

"Is it?"

"I think so. I'm okay with having messed up, more than with having never stood a chance..."

"Hm. ...I don't really know enough about how the free will thing works to guess if he did stand a chance in some sense or not, really..."

"The Valar don't have free will either but we sure blame them for things when they do stupid evil things."

"Yeah, I guess that's true."

"And he wasn't stupid or evil just very hurt and scared but still if he'd been smarter - if he could have figured out something better than the Silmarils -"

"I suppose in the degenerate case if he'd invented outright omnipotence just because it might come in handy some day things would have gone differently, what I'm not sure is what the accessible intermediate cases look like."

"I knew I should be doing that!"

"But omnipotence isn't something you can just go downtown and grab off a shelf, and it would take so long to do it as a single thing, so it makes more sense to get one ability and then another one and then another, and then you have to do that in some kind of order..."