The grownups are all very busy, but the children are all bored.
Bored or having nightmares. But Tasárinon was not on a ship and did not see the people dying and has only heard it thirdhand and can't exactly have nightmares about the look in his mother's eyes - well, he probably could, but he hasn't - so he's bored, and he is drawing on the floor. It is an absurdly intricate drawing. He has been embellishing it for three days.
...he would really really like to do that but the reason they are on a planetoid all the way out here is that people knowing stuff about him is kind of bad. He is open to suggestions on how to convey nothing other than "not dead".
They can't really think of anything. At least the dead don't get tortured by Elf gods anymore.
Cam is so in favor of cutting Elf gods out of the dead-people-handling process. Anyway here is a bunch of food and the orcs' favorite sections of their local library and he is really really sorry.
They are still mostly quiet when not being directly addressed with questions. At that they uncertainly try to reassure him that it's okay.
That's sweet of them. Do they, like, want some Earth video games or something for their trouble.
...sure?
Cool here's a bunch that don't rely on lots of ingame language. Have fun. If you need anything write it up and title it 'from the family on the planetoid'.
And then he flies away to conduct experiments. Test #1: who wrote the parley letter?
Trying to summon the creator of the parley letter doesn't produce anything at all.
...that's weird.
Okay, suppose it's a Maia, maybe those are nonphysical entities, but they have bodies sometimes, right, what if he tries to make the body of the author.
That works! Looks like an orc. A tall, comparatively symmetrical orc, but definitely an orc.
Cam takes some pictures of it, then boots it into space and interpolates it. Okay, now: aliens?
Nope.
...he tries progressively larger intervals of "written work produced during", expands to "recorded work" - nope.
Okay. FTL experiments.
The King conveniently has them listed by experiment contents, expected result, interesting failure, success. All but one get the expected result. One gets the outcome he called 'interesting failure'.
Cam takes dutiful notes, and then he descends towards Endorë. When he's within range of the phone satellites he texts Fëanáro his results, encrypted by one-time pad.
The response is a list of ten more tests.
Three with interesting failures.
Won't be ten years, is the response, but won't be less than two and I'll have to hand everything else off. If you want to come in my son Tyelcormo wants to pitch you on a non-escalatory air force, don't know the details but do trust him.
"Hi. I don't think we've actually met, I was coordinating flying these things and Maitimo's being possessive. This -" he indicates a computer model - "is the fighters that the Federated Falas are using, and - "this is the same thing but with three main improvements, those being that it can take off from the surface of the water, that it's damn near impossible for the kind of rocketry they're using to hurt the pilot, and that if the pilot wants they can fireball it in midair in a way the chips won't survive. Can't carry any more, can't fly any faster, not any more maneuverable, will take hits just as satisfyingly if they wouldn't hit the pilot. We want to go help them with their airstrikes problem."
"Defensively with aerial dogfights or, like, going and airstriking the orcs back...?"
"Halls no, going down over enemy territory seems super bad and anyway the Falathrim aren't doing it so it might count as an escalation. Have you noticed what an annoying fucking constraint that is, by the way? Defensively."
"Oh believe me I've noticed," sighs Cam. "Okay, how many do you want?"
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