"I learn faster than demons, you don't have to retrace half what you say to fill I in."

"Fair enough. 'Fill me in'."

"I'll read and you can fill me in when I don't understand vocabulary. And read about Moringotho. 'the war'?"

"The war."

And he turns to the book. He interrupts frequently at first, then less so. 

Cam goes through his reading material.

After a while he has more requests for documentation. 

Which he provides.

"Do you need anything else to make up your mind about the war?"

"It'd be nice to have more reason to believe that this is all from a free press and so on but I'm definitely willing to at least make you ships and food and a city and suspect over the course of doing all that I will have more opportunities to learn things on a less explicitly you-tell-me-stuff level."

"'Thank you'? And you could look up enough to confirm that Oaths work and then request one, though I'm content waiting."

"Thank you," Cam translates. "It's implausible that you'd have been able to curate enough stuff for me to conjure up with a consistent picture of oaths but that implausibility relies on your information technology not being too much more ridiculously advanced than mine, and yours can do mind backups, which mine can't."

"Fair enough. I expect we'll be attacked immediately on landing; can I expect you'll help if we are?"

"What kind of help do you have in mind?"

"This ships aren't meant for fights. If they come under fire they will fall apart and the people in them will die."

"Well, do you have designs for more defensible ones or do you just want me to try to surround an entire fleet of ships in keratin or what?"

"There has never been a war in Elven history. I can sit here and design a more defensible one if it's worth the time lost on the other side, or we can switch ships to something better once we've leapt light. I assume this is a solved problem in places that have wars."

"Yeah, I can put you all in something armored up, what are you going to be shot at with?"

"Orcs definitely don't have light-leaping, definitely do have rocketry, I'm not sure what weapons lie in that range because again we didn't go through the ordinary technological path here."

"Anything radioactive? Can you quantify approximate explosive yield? What are they going to be using to detect you in the first place?"

"Perhaps we should send some autopiloted ships in first and see."

"Yeah, sure, I can get you drones."

"Thank you. Do you require sleep? Shelter I assume you can do."

"I can sleep but I can also just drink lots of coffee forever!"

He looks wildly envious. "Sometime you'll have to tell me more about how one becomes a demon."