"Good call. You can do 'the complete written works of this universe' or 'the last twelve seconds of written works' but not 'the first written works of every species with writing'?"

"There could still be a trillion of them," Cam says.

"Does your home universe have aliens?"

"Nope, we checked. I think the check may only have been for living aliens in the human world though, we could have missed somebody else's universe sharing our afterlives and just being very far away."

"Every work written by Elves in Limbo?"

Cam tries it. "Nope."

"Didn't think so. There aren't any Elves that aren't backed up, anyway... Dwarves in Limbo?"

"...Also no."

"Dwarves in their afterlife? Would that be sufficiently specified?"

"They have one? Probably..." Cam tries it. Posthumous works of Dwarves.

Nope. "I didn't think they had one," he says, "but it seemed worth checking."

"Poor Dwarves."

"They live about two hundred fifty, three hundred years, and then just wear out and die. It's really weird. That is the sort of thing which we can almost certainly fix as soon as we know more about it, though."

"Hope so. Be nice to fix that for humans too, Limbo being the disappointment it is."

A longer pause. "Father says the Silmarils would make it trivial, mindless Silmarils probably aren't good enough, and that the things he'd need to do it are at least things he'd be able to pull off again without access to Valinor's resources."

"Cool. I mean, I assume this means trivial given a way to get there, which the Valar claim to have prohibited, and I assume you don't want to give me the Silmarils to take home and carry around in case of summoning."

"I don't think we can run the backups without all three, no. Silmarils as a stopgap for everyone who ages in this universe, while he designs something demon-reproducible; then you can go home and tell the fairies to tell the people you have faster-than-light travel and immortality for them."

"Sounds good."

"Anything else of interest from Angband is going to take longer to find. I'll keep you updated - is there a way to do that remotely -"

"In that direction, yeah, just title things 'letter to Cam'."

"And is there a way for my people to keep in touch with me in Brithombar, other than stationing someone every three hundred miles between here and there?"

"Do you think phones and relays would constitute escalation?"

"The Enemy knows we had those in Valinor. I can't imagine he thinks we'll refrain from using them here. Secured ones might be an escalation."

"Do you want insecure ones?"

"Unless you think it's a bad idea. If he's monitoring them I can use it towards the misinformation we've been attempting as well."