"Valar are big magic things, Maiar are a range of smaller magic things, and Eru is, like, God. Elves claim to be a created species, humans-on-Endorë certainly look like they are, I didn't meet any tree people, Dwarves are great though have you met any Dwarves they kind of shot me a lot but I don't hold that against them there were signs posted and everything..."

"Ada may have. I haven't been to the surface of Endore, personally."

"Ada's your fork?"

"Yep. We decided to take advantage of the fact that of necessity the forks look like Elves."

"Makes sense. What's she working on while you try to route around the Earth being rigged to blow?"

"Figuring out more about what exactly Melkor is up to."

"Mine was having a deceptively low-tech war because if he escalated too much the Valar would have gotten off their asses. - I should give you the design for the chip-melting suicide things, I assume being caught by your Melkor is bad even if it's not as bad as being caught by mine."

"Yeah, probably a good idea. What happened if you were caught by your Melkor?"

"Destructive uploading, arbitrary number of forks sped up arbitrarily much, horrifying torture." He rummages in his files and de-chiplocks the plans for the thing. "Computer lock chips work on my Elves, you might want to double check for yours."

"That sounds like a good idea. How do I check if my Melkor is doing that."

"Mine was not particularly secretive about it, for psychological warfare reasons, but if the Elves on Endorë don't know about it it's possible yours isn't, you could conjure up his servers and look them over or something..."

"Yeah, probably a good idea. I think I'm going to try that now in the backyard, wanna come?"

"Sure, I'm planning on abusing the fuck out of this time-pausing feature anyway."

Backyard. And Edie conjures--any servers that Melkor is using to torture people.

"Oops," she says, as the entire spatially available backyard fills with computer, and then, "Fuck."

"Yyyyyep."

"Well now I guess I get to explain to Aegnor that it is in fact worth it to evacuate the Earth."

"Worth it yes, feasible to do, not necessarily."

"Yeah. Argh."

"You could publicize on Earth that ex-summoners get to be daeva, give them a bit, and blow the place."

"The fact that the lizard-kangaroo-fairy who wasn't even an ex-summoner was pretty zen about the extinction event several million years ago does not make me thrilled with the prospect."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to want to explore a lot more of option-space before I go with the one that irrevocably sunders families."

Nod.

"Especially with Milliways time-stopping meaning no one's getting tortured while I dither."

"Yeah, that's a perk."