"It is a good thing that we are used to paradise and don't have any state secrets," he says, frowning, "that seems extremely exploitable."

"Yeah, I am a terrible infosec hazard, it's a thing."

"It's convenient at the moment. I think this war is about as justified as any war has ever been and I'd like you to be able to verify that as quickly as possible."

"Won't be long now, you don't have that many letters."

"We don't. Everything's spelled exactly as it sounds, too. We took good care of the language."

"Oh, I could live with irregular spelling, fluency comes with the summons."

"Can you do me a big favor and not mention that to the King? He'll spend the next three weeks picking your brain on every language you know and I need him for some things."

"...isn't he going to want to know how I came by Quenya?"

He shrugs helplessly. "You'll probably have to cop to at least one additional language, maybe two, but he'll pick up those in a few days. If you speak thirty or something our brightest mind will be out of commission for the next Year."

"...it's more than that."

"So please save that for if we need to peacefully remove my father from power, don't mention it outright."

"I really don't know how I'm supposed to explain speaking Quenya then!"

"On your world, everyone speaks - pick one. When you get summoned you get that language. Since you got summoned here you got Quenya. If you get summoned by a Vala you'd get Valarin. He'll demand to know how he can become a demon but I won't have to rule for a decade while he's becoming fluent in more than thirty languages he'll never need and then writing books about their linguistic evolution."

"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."