"Besides knowing his alts I don't have any evidence about it that you don't."

"How are his alts, are they happy, are they getting to do interesting challenging things -"

"Yeah."

"Thank you for coming here and telling me what's going on."

"You're welcome."

"Have fun deciding what to do about this terribly distracting planet. Should I keep nudging it into a democracy or are you not leaning towards 'arbitrary power to non-disruptively shoot whoever's in charge' after all?"

"I'm not leaning that way but I am generally acknowledged to be not performing up to par, who knows what the others'll think. They'd object to the characterization anyway."

"I noticed. I'm going to use it anyway until they offer up criteria for when they're going to do it, if 'the guy in charge looks like a friend of ours' is the only circumstance sufficiently upsetting that's one thing. But if our first prime minister holds that all these bad things happened because I didn't go in to Lórien for correction and that more stringent enforcement of the law - including mandatory correction of people experiencing same-gender attraction - is his top policy priority, going to depose him too? If his replacement thinks that you should be allowed to contract yourself into slavery? If his replacement thinks that interbreeding weakens the superior Noldorin race?"

"I think Vanda Nossëo's pangalactic thingamabob mostly handles this with exit rights but we don't know what's wrong with this place and are concerned it's contagious, so."

"If you're going to just murder your way on through whoever we have in charge I can try setting up an ineffectual democracy so you can rule things behind the scenes? Also why are you not considered up to par you're by far the most useful of your template."

"That would be the thing where I was in Angband for a while, coped by literally ceasing to think, still have to assume that anything I experience may be a hallucination even after my alts spooked me out of that, am still brushing the rust off my brain, etcetera."

"I'm sorry. If this is what you're like rusty you're going to be impressive once you're back in shape."

"You didn't actually meet the others at their best, you know."

"They're welcome to come by and try to impress me if they like, too."

"Not their mission in life. Anyway, nobody actually wants to commit a series of political assassinations, puppet democracy is - distasteful but would probably require less ongoing wheel-spinning - but we could actually just suck it up and leave your crown on, there are worse things and Forever's got away as clean as he likes already -"

"That'd be lovely. Can my alts cope?"

"Probably?"

"Are there things I can do that can make it easier for my alts to cope?"

"Nothing leaps to mind, at least not that would still have any signaling value if you did it on being prompted."

"If you're exaggerating the extent of your inability to find Forever to me, it'd be a good idea to tell him this, so he knows not to come back."

"I'm sure if we really needed him for something we could eventually find him but it'd be genuinely inconvenient and time-consuming, and we in fact don't have a way to talk to him without doing that unless Loki's friend decides to play messenger or something."

"Well, if Loki's friend decides to play messenger tell him that my alts have important projects and need him to convincingly recover or if he can't fake that stay out of sight or they'll mope too much to get their important projects done, and that the country's stable and his family's safe."

"...I'll take that under advisement."

"If him coming back causes some sort of interdimensional crisis he would want to know that."

"Yes, I assume so, but I'd at least consult Pterodactyl - that being my Findekáno - before putting it in terms like 'the Maitimos need you to convincingly recover'."