"Seems like a reasonable guess. We're working on crystal-ball-to-science-ethernet compatibility as one of our few dozen projects."

"How do crystal balls work?"

"Wizardry! They are... not an introductory topic, at least if you mean how they're put together as opposed to how one uses them."

"I mean how they process and store information. But I suppose I shall have to start at my wizardly basics when you give your lecture."

"It'll be just like when I lived in Tirion only without the passive-aggressive lecture followed by debate on therapeutic ethics."

He raises an eyebrow. "How did that come about?"

"I was unsatisfied with the condition of some of the reembodied. So I fixed what I could in anybody who wanted me to and then I wrote up a lecture about my native country's ethical standards for subtle artists and with a revised section around oaths because Materia doesn't have those they were adopted in response and as was intended people noticed Mandos was not meeting the standards... there were protests and reembodiments have been suspended, it was not my best work."

He raises an eyebrow. "Now I want to go visit your Valinor. That is a fight I considered picking many times. I am sort of glad to know it would have gone badly."

"You are welcome to go visit my Valinor if you don't think the Valar will try to keep you."

"Ensuring that Valar could not keep me has been something of an obsession."

"...right. They can pretty much suppress wizardry at will so Fëanáro hasn't been visiting home, but your thing may not have this drawback."

"My thing is now indelibly seared into my head and I don't think it has that drawback."

"Good for you."

"Thank your Loki. Sort of. It took her decades to trust me with it but after the war she was generously inclined."

"Why'd it take so long?"

"It's very powerful, and she didn't want anyone in Arda to have that kind of power. Eventually we convinced her that meant if she died the whole war was lost, and suggested she use oaths to ensure obedience to whatever conditions she cared to name, and she agreed to share it with people oath-bound not to try to reconstruct how it worked or develop new things from it until she died or won the war. And even on those terms she wouldn't give it to my family because she knew we'd teleport to take back something we needed for the war effort. In fairness I don't think she knew how badly we needed it, we were trying to keep its capabilities secret. Invention of Father's. 

I disagreed with her, and said so, and would have gotten through the worst of the suicidality much earlier if I could teleport, and said that too. But she promised once she won the war we could learn it and she did keep that promise."

"...Hm."

"You didn't hesitate to hand my father world- altering power? I suppose he's likelier to listen to you about what to do with it, Loki got on with us but we are hard to characterize as obedient."

"...I recognize you, I think. Before my Valar decided I was too much trouble to be worth it they showed me some stuff. I wouldn't want to hand the oath world-altering power."

"The Oath, if it's the same one, is also made way, way less dangerous with teleportation. 'You have to hurt people if you can't retrieve this' is not a problem well mitigated by making you less able to retrieve things and more able to kill people. And by then we were very good at killing people, though we got very lucky and it all worked out."

"Hm."

"Everyone else read it as her punishing us for the Oath and subsequent catastrophes by giving her powers to everyone else, and as making us provide the needed materials - it was a lot of complicated magic - as a show of power, but I don't think that was her intent or that she was entirely aware it was the result."

"Yeah, I doubt that was what she was going for."

"We only got the Silmarils back with about ten minutes to spare, and if there'd happened to be an earthquake in the wrong place before Findekáno found me we would all have died, but it did work out. And by that point I think that was an acceptable risk to her because she had plans to bring us back."

"I will want to hear her version of this before deciding what I think of it."