"All right. First order of business, who wants to be a Catholic priest?"

"I thought the names were going to be the first order of business."

"No, they're last, because our understanding of the most suitable name for the creatures will be influenced by all of the preceding information about their characteristics. And because I might want to leave before you're through deciding on a name. I read the proposal document and it looked like the kind of thing it'd take centuries to get through."

"In Valinor it might've taken centuries, but half of that would be waiting for idiots to make their idiotic arguments thoroughly enough that they wouldn't feel misunderstood by the rebuttal."

"I'll revise my time estimate down by half. Anyway, first order of business is who wants to be a Catholic priest."

"Remind me why we need one."

"I still think we should do field experiments first."

"That's the third item on the agenda. There's a lot we'll want to confirm with live subjects, but on some matters the books we've managed to purchase or....otherwise recover are uniform in their recommendations, across enough time periods, enough languages and enough interpretations of their subject matter that I think we can assume their claims have, in fact, been verified in field experiments. The creatures whose naming convention is pending are vulnerable to beheading, wood through their heart, sunlight, crosses, and holy water. Holy water is water that has been blessed according to rites practiced by either the Catholic or Orthodox Christian churches, any priest of either faith can produce it at any time by doing those rites, and so somebody is going to go become a priest. It doesn't take very long, couple of years, and it lasts forever as far as I can determine. It seems easier to get ordained Catholic in the countries on this continent but if someone really wants to retain the option to get married -"

"Catholic priests don't marry?"

"Nope! As far as I can tell that's the only difference but I don't think I'm the target audience of human religions. Both of 'em have pretty cathedrals."

"Pretty-pretty, or just okay -"

"Some of them are genuinely beautiful!"

"Why is this highest priority, and what are the requirements?"

"I figured maybe someone could go get it out of the way while we're naming the things, and it also seems potentially relevant in more ways than the strategic merits of making holy water. If these specific religious rituals and symbols have symbolic power against evil forces -"

"Can someone explain what a religion is?"

"It's a human institution for transmitting various sets of instructions they believe Eru to have entrusted them with. There are lots of them, but crosses are associated with one of the largest, and the holy water ritual associated with the largest sub-sect thereof -- humans often schism over details of Eru's instructions or their implementation -"

"Huh. Is Eru entrusting them with instructions or are they attributing his intent to miscellaneous nonsense -"

"Presumably some of both. The Catholic story is that Eru chose to be born to a human woman in order to live a human life and share his teachings, and lived as a human doing miracles and teaching and so on, and was then betrayed and torturously executed, promising all humans eternal life with him if they choose to follow him."

"That sounds like Eru," everyone says in unison.

"So I don't think the couple of years in priest school will be wasted, this seems like a good thing to have some context on generally."

"I take it you don't want to do it, though."

"It kind of looks like it'd compete with making a lot of money and we're still going to need a lot of money."

"Sticks are cheap, water's pretty much free, sunlight is what I think you'd call non-rivalrous and non-excludable -"

He had his mouth open to object at the start of that sentence but by the end of it just beams at him.

"Transit isn't free, access isn't free, nice places to stay aren't free, more sophisticated human-made weapons won't be free, politicians look by preliminary investigations to be expensive."

"I mean, sure, eventually, but we still don't really know what we're dealing with? There are references in those books to all kinds of institutions and organizations and greater evils which cannot access this world and - we don't want to be making waves before we know what's out there to come after us for it. Killing things is gonna be fine, there are lots of things killing things out there. Something elaborate -"

"Should wait, yeah. But when we are ready for it we'll want to have resources."

"Well, okay. I probably can't do priest school on account of I heard the word 'school' in there."

"I can do it."

"No. - same reason as Moryo, opportunity costs," which is transparently a lie to everyone, but what exactly the lie is covering for is apparently discernible only to Maedhros, who nods curtly.

"How sure are we that holy water won't burn us? On the same principle as the Silmarils, I mean -"

"Burning evil things is not a general known property of holy water but yes, we should check that. They have it in basins at churches."

"The principle with the Silmarils is that a hostile actor specifically cursed them to do that, there's no reason to expect it to generalize."

"Well, if we think this religion is Eru's - reconciliation with Man, or something -"

"I don't actually think Eru hates us."

"Seems like the kind of thing we'd find out when attempting to become his servant. Do you want to -"

"No."

"Religions have lots of singing. Hymns, and so on."

"If you wanted to nominate me for this you could've just said so. I don't like the vow not to marry. The other one lets you marry?"

"Yes. You might also be able to renounce priestliness to marry, I'm not clear on that, do check before you jaunt off to the Ukraine to do something you could do right down the road. I assume you're not planning to marry any time in the next several centuries."

"As far as we know there are no women in the world."

"Can you do it if you've been married before -"

"Catholicism doesn't have any teachings on what dying and then being resurrected millennia later does to a marriage but it's Eru who gave them their rules in the first place so I can't imagine you'd ever not be married under Catholic law when you are, in fact, married in the eyes of the giver of that law."

"I said I'd do it."

"Don't embarrass us."

"I don't think I will. I like God. Can I really do it right down the road, if I promise not to marry for the next couple of centuries -"

"Yeah, you can. About a hundred miles from here. It'd be convenient, you could bounce the texts and lessons and so on over for us -"

"And it's just marriage that's prohibited -"

"You're going to have to look that up yourself. I think a lot of other things are at least frowned upon."

He sighs artfully and tragically.

"...second item of business is impending apocalypses. It appears that the world is regularly threatened by various malicious entities from other ones, or occasional magic rituals which purportedly have the power to collapse dimensions. It seems unlikely that the world has nearly ended a bunch of times and will actually end at some point in the near future, because if the world were that fragile it would probably have ended already, but it's conceivable that we're supposed to be the instrument of the next bunch of thwarted apocalypses. We need to look into it. Also into stabilizing the world so it ceases to be on the brink of apocalypse, but it's unclear how to do that without powerful magic, and powerful magic is item four on the agenda - it's after field experiments because one of the objectives of field experiments should be to get a lot of magical items and spellbooks for research."

"How many apocalypses -"

"I've identified twenty-three."

"Eru."

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain." He points at the spot on the flyer Caranthir handed him where it says this.

"What am I supposed to say instead?"

"That's not on the flyer! ...I think if you add 'please stop doing this stuff and let us learn about rocketry' then it's a prayer and so it's not in vain."

" - alright, I'm coining a new word as I'm permitted as this is a quorum of the Noldorin linguistics guild on this continent. The word means 'please stop doing this stuff and let us learn about rocketry', and the proposed pronunciation is 'ahhhh'. All in favor -"

"In favor. Expedited and approved."

"Is that good enough?"

"Hey, I haven't done the two years of classes yet. I can't think why not, though."

"Dare I hope that the discussion over what to call the things will go a tenth as quickly?"

"No!" Curufin and Fëanor both say at once, scandalized. "That's important!"

"When's the next apocalypse?"

"November, in Pune, India, cultists of the demon Oulorev are expected to try to raise him when the astrological signs are aligned, he is reputed to destroy worlds by lighting all their air afire."

"There's no one handling this shit?"

"There are plenty of people who consider it their duty. They mostly strike me as inept but perhaps I'm missing important context, and, well, the world does still exist. I don't know that we want to intervene in Pune, I assume various other groups will be attempting it and it seems like a good way to make our existence known before we know who might react to it and how."

"Shame if the world ends, though."

"We could stop by in October and kill all of the cultists who are planning to raise this demon."

"We can do that, yeah. It might be our comparative advantage, even, because a surprising number of the organizations that attempt to protect the world are unwilling to kill humans."

"Huh, why?"

"Well, some of them are humans. Dunno what's going on with the ones that aren't. It's also possible that their public statements in books humans have access to don't reflect their actual policies."

"Humans leave a body. Depending what level of competence you're operating at, that's a significant added complication."

"Most kinds of demons seem to leave a body, it's just vampires that go poof. - did you have a plan to dispose of a body -"

"I mean, long-term I'd like local authorities to work for us but short-term it generally works fine to chop a body into small pieces, wrap the parts in plastic, and lawfully dispose of garbage bags of waste at the nearest dump. As far as I can tell humans normally don't do that because they're squeamish, physically frail enough that the task is exhausting, and inexperienced enough with gutting animals that they get blood everywhere."

"Now this sounds like a task I'm qualified for. Pune, find cultists, stop cultists, get out before anyone else planning to interfere with the apocalypse arrives?"

"Maybe worthwhile."

"I want a much more detailed rundown of who might interfere. And of the complications magic introduces. And for that matter of why there are cultists trying to end the world -"

"Aww, c'mon, are you saying you wouldn't try to end the world if the chance presented itself?"

"I asked about their reasons, not whether reasons exist in principle."

"Not a spectacularly reassuring answer."

"- can we not do this again right now -"

"I can check why the cultists are a-culting and if they turn out to not be suicidal I can have a go at not killing them."

"I have a list of organizations and individuals noted to have intervened in sixty recent averted apocalypses." He passes it across the table. 

"I hope you're not expecting me to read this."

"It's in your alphabet."

"Huh."

"What's the apocalypse after Pune?"

"Keep in mind that there are probably lots of apocalypses the timing of which is not already known to someone who we acquired books from. I expect we're catching maybe ten percent of apocalypses on this list, maybe only five. But the next one we have here is in January, in Stockholm."

"I think this is a waste of time."

"I was kind of expecting you to say that."

"It looks like handling each of these individually is going to require substantial planning just to mitigate the risks we already know about, and that most of the risks are ones we don't know to look out for. It looks like most of these organizations have a high mortality rate, which we cannot tolerate. Magic can be used to locate a Silmaril; magic can probably be used to reconstitute bodies without Mandos; once we've done that you can risk your bodies on putting out these stupid brush fires, if you like.

Right now, the only apocalypses that we know about are also known to other parties, because they're ones whose time and place are derivable. I agree that none of the other parties seem competent but that's sufficiently surprising that we might assume there are some constraints we haven't identified."

"I agree with most of that but I don't think it's actually very surprising that all the existing institutions are terrible. They are largely made up of humans, have an appalling mortality rate, and run on a confusing mess of ancient traditions some of which are vital for reasons they no longer know and some of which are just disastrous. I wouldn't expect competence under the conditions and its absence isn't remotely surprising."

"They're doing work you can't be bothered to do."

"That makes them heroic, it doesn't make them competent."

"That's a convenient distinction to consider important."

"We will intervene once we have a much clearer picture of all the other actors on the scene, including an understanding of why they're as competent or incompetent as they are. The world will hold until then; we haven't encountered any indications that the risks of its destruction have grown in the last few centuries?"

"Not yet but I want to emphasize how much we don't yet know."

Bounce bounce - "so we need some more books."

"And field experiments, which is item three on the agenda."

"Can we get an overview of the whole agenda -"

"It's in your stack of papers somewhere. First, priest. Second, apocalypses, third, field experiments, fourth, magic, fifth, other open avenues of investigation, sixth, budget, seventh, demonic languages, eighth, Quenya words for everything."

"There are so many things we need words for!"

"Yep! But not just yet. Tyelcormo worked up a list of field experiments -"

"Verify stakes, beheading, sunlight, holy water. Measure how much sunlight and how much holy water; test artificial lights with the same spectrum and intensity as sunlight; test water blessed by various other religious rituals, test symbols of other religions. Test bullets with a splinter of wood in them; test the presumably non-lethal effects of bullets without a splinter of wood in them. Test their healing. Test their senses. Test what kinds of containment are adequate. Supposedly they cannot enter a residence without permission: test what constitutes a residence and what constitutes permission. Test whether they starve, and whether they can feed on animal blood, and whether they can feed on synthetic blood. Talk to them and figure out if any of them are not dangerous to everyone around 'em."

"Seems like that last one should maybe be first so we don't kill a lot of innocent people."

"I was gonna follow them around until they tried to do some murder. Obviously we can't go killing random ones not presently doing murder."

"The books imply they're uniformly evil because they don't have a soul."

"Honestly I don't give a shit what the books say but also, what? Do humans even have souls to start with?"

"No idea, how would we check?"

"Dunno. Then I've got the list of aspirational field tests: do Silmarils destroy them? Can you untransform one back into a human? If the things are not obligate evil, do many humans wanna be them to get out of the aging thing? What's the biggest thing you can declare a residence? If they are obligate evil, what would an eradication program look like, and if they were all eradicated is there any path to re-introduction?"

"The process of turning people into a vampire. Supposedly it involves drinking the victim's blood and then having the victim drink your blood. How much blood? Can it be interrupted? It'll be a hassle to test -"

"A hassle? It'll involve a lot of murder."

"We can probably find volunteers, or at least people who deserve it, but I agree it's low-priority."

"Do we have an estimate of the scope of the harm here, that's something I very much want to know -"

"Not much of one. Some cities in the U.S. have violent crime rates forty times those of other cities, but not all of that is going to be other-creatures. I haven't dug much into what share is. About thirty thousand people in the U.S. die by homicide every year. If that's half other-creatures, and the same rate worldwide, it'd be 300,000 a year."

"Could easily be a tenth of that, though."

"Yep, I have no idea."

"Field tests with other demons - what are they, how many kinds are there, can they safely be summoned, where and how do they live their lives, how are they killed, are they even evil or do some of them just accidentally destroy the world sometimes. Why any of this is a secret - how many important humans know about it? Does a human who witnesses something remember it? Does a human who witnesses something nonhuman about us remember it? What happens if you tell a human about all of this and provide evidence? How are the humans involved with the various organizations that interfere in catastrophes recruited?"

"Other human legends, and whether they have more grounding in reality than we'd initially assumed. Faeries? Leprechauns? Loch Ness monster? Santa Claus?"

"Means of disposal of bodies that prevent them from returning as vampires."

"Do we want a word that distinguishes dead-with-body-destroyed and dead-in-a-manner-vulnerable-to-this -"

"We are not there on the agenda yet."

"I think maybe we should skip to it, the rest of these conversations are going to be so difficult to have with ugly words."