"Very informative. I am substantially more confident the Enemy sucks; apparently sucking the entire planet into a black hole only might work; I cannot copy the keep-away field because it runs directly on the Maia who is queen of its contents; if I give you nicer weapons than what's around right now it's entirely possible the Enemy just escalates right back because honestly what the fuck is a black-hole-surviving entity doing with mass suicide runs of expendable troops and small yield explosives; the people of Brithombar are delighted that I can't copy minds because they associate that sort of thing with being destructively uploaded into subjectively indefinite torture simulations; there may be backups of those off-planet; Dwarves do not get to come back to life even through your dubiously competent system and there's about a hundred mil and they won't tell me where they are; Brithombar doesn't want to evacuate either; and it seems like it's possible the single most valuable thing I can do here is design and install suicide triggers that thoroughly obliterate chips."

He stands still for a minute.

"Fuck."

"Yep."

"I can probably get Dwarves to tell you where they are. It will probably take a few months. Under any kind of computing system I have heard of you need space and equipment the Enemy, not being a demon, cannot summon at will so if we level Angband immediately with anything you have that could do that we will probably reduce the number of torture-simulations happening - and if he has to make a run to backups somewhere, we can watch the run, maybe try to intercept it - "

"Supposedly some of his minions could be theoretically convinced to cough up locations, or I could infosec-hazard it maybe depending on how he handles recordkeeping. Following him relies on him using a followable method of travel. And if I level Angband with a weapon he may decide that's fair game now and if I do it directly - there's really no explanation for why rockets and flinging orcs at people, these tech levels do not match, and I promise you warfare can get uglier than this."

"I guess I will just have to take your word for it. If Brithombar thinks that why are they not evacuating? Or committing suicide en masse?"

"Don't want to go off live on some strange scarily powerful person's planet. I'm not sure this is unanimous and I will be delighted to make off with any dissenters and put them in pretty arcologies."

"Well in fairness last time this happened we went off to live with the scary powerful people and it was grand until we wanted to leave. I can probably change that too but seems like Dwarves might be more important..."

"To be fair if they aren't being backed up it's possible they also can't be uploaded."

"Yes but we can't wipe out a planet with a hundred million irretrievable people on it."

"I know. But wiping out the planet might not even work."

"If we flew some of the ships into Angband, no effort to slow the descent from orbit, that wouldn't be a capabilities escalation, would it? Could alter the ships so they could be piloted remotely..."

"- well, the locals don't have the ships, but yes, if 'having ships' is an escalation using them for ramming is probably not a step up from whatever damage has already been done."

"I want to level the place even if that only delays him marginally. Father."

Fëanáro turns around as they enter the room. "It sounds like the mission that makes the most sense for us here is to convince everyone to trust you and evacuate and try to figure out what'd kill the Enemy, is that right?" 

"That'd be swell. Probably easier if there's FTL comms and everyone can say how nice it is on my sunless planet."

"I have a list of experiments - heading letter-to-Cam #1 - but I don't expect them to work or even fail informatively, FTL communications is not the sort of thing I was expecting to need for this war. You can summon people their family member's video chats about the sunless planet, yes? I need to speak to my people, some of them may want to evacuate, knowing this -"

"I need them," Maitimo says, "if I am going to convince a hundred million people to evacuate. We don't have to be last out but we can't leave now."

"I know what to say," he says.

"Thank you."

"How thoroughly can you not separately evacuate kids."

They both freeze. "I can do whatever I want," Fëanáro says. "It would be unprecedented and considered a great evil, but." He shrugs. 

"What specifically is the problem, here - like, on Earth there was a war called World War II and this one country in the thick of things shipped all its children out to the strategically uninteresting countryside so they wouldn't get blown up, I am sure people missed their families but the kids did not get blown up -"

"It's a cultural thing," Maitimo says, "the Eldar live forever and childhood's very short in proportion, to willingly separate children and parents is robbing them both of more than their life, life we can have back. I do think that order'd be obeyed without serious problems if we gave it. But it would be considered worse than shooting a lot of people for their own good, which is another thing the current situation arguably warrants but to which we all have an instinctive revulsion."

"I somehow don't think Mr. Torture Simulation draws the line at kids but I will leave it to you to weigh the risks."

"I know," Maitimo says. "I know." And then he goes quiet; everyone in the underground city except Cam can hear the King speak. 

Cam fiddles with teeny-tiny chip-melty designs and triggers that might suit.

"Alright," the King says after a moment. "I said we are evacuating kids and anyone who wants to leave - Nelyafinwe, your guess as to -"

"You will not have enough people leaving to take care of all the kids," Maitimo says. He's staring at his father with something like awe. 

"I can make another pass at Brithombar. Some of them there even speak Quenya."