"This will involve blatant lies about how mortals in my world work, let alone the linguistic habits of daeva."

"On your head be it, then. Don't say you weren't warned."

"I'm just not sure I'll be very convincing if I tell him yep, everybody in my world speaks English all the time, pay no attention to the etymology behind the curtain - might be easier to pass off Chinese -"

"Everyone who's summoned you, right? And I'll trust you on what would be convincing - it's just - the King's murder was very much orchestrated to make a point to my father, and the Enemy very much succeeded in making that point, and my father's very easily distracted by intellectually intriguing things anyway, but this is going to be a lot of politics as well as a lot of engineering and language-learning, figuring out how best to protect Endore."

"I'll steer around it best I can," Cam sighs.

"Thank you. I won't be annoyed if you don't. I can't actually think of much you'd do short of hurting my people that would annoy me, these ships will change everything and a faster arrival will save hundreds of thousands of lives."

"Y'know, I never get to do the saving hundreds of thousands of lives thing anymore and it's been grating on me."

"Winning the war would save - I don't know the current population of Endore but plausibly billions. We can't claim all that benefit just from arriving a little faster, though.

We're about ten minutes out from our destination, what else should I cover? Political structure, enemy capabilities, timeline of the recent mess..."

Cam informs his computer of another Quenya glyph. "Anything you haven't mentioned I should stuff onto this chip?"

"The Valar are really furiously angry with us with reasonably good reasons and we're exiled from here, that doesn't change the strategic picture much but I suppose is worth mentioning. They've also suggested they'll delay reembodiments for a few Ages, which means we're more hesitant to risk our lives than we ordinarily would be."

"What is a reembodiment?"

"We're not indestructible. So the Vala of the Dead, Mandos, keeps a backup of everyone's mind in the Halls and if we die he can build us a new body and reinstall our minds and we can return. It's the same hardware that gives us telepathy and Oaths, which is why I inferred you didn't have the latter from the absence of the first two."

"...huh. Do you have copies of your own backups?"

"No, just Mandos. Special Vala privileges - could you make them."

"Can't do minds. ...Although I don't actually know how that applies to pure data-based minds, if they're that."

"I think they are? The Valar gloss their own abilities as magic - well, as divine power - but lately we've gotten skeptical. I'd be reluctant to hand you a copy of my mind anyway, that's very very abuseable."

"Oh yeah. Anyway, if I try to make a person, I get the body, and it'll be alive, and breathe, and stuff, but it will be disturbingly stupid."

"...and if you then instantiated the mind from backup..."

"No idea! We don't do backups, even the mortals."

"...so they just get annihilated if they die? That's kind of awful."

"Oh, no, they go to Limbo. It's not exactly nice there but they're indestructible as daeva, just no snazzy magic powers besides that and a really boring world."

"That's interesting. As far as we know if we're destroyed and all our backups are destroyed we stop existing. But we also did not know daeva existed."

"...uh, also, people who summon daeva get to be daeva when they die instead, and I have no idea how that would interact with backups."

"Uh.

That would be worth testing if we could get a volunteer but I am not sure I'd feel comfortable asking anyone to volunteer." He gestures ahead. "That's our technical support ship - by which I mean it's where my father and my technically-inclined brothers have been working - and I bet they'll have compatibility working in what-would-have-been-a-day-when-this-system-had-Suns."

"Cool. You never did say if I should stuff anything else onto the chip I'm going to conjure up, now that my computer can handle Quenya?"