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.
"Only sort of straightforward. Angels need to do their own detail work to a degree demons don't, you need a highly trained angel to handle that sort of thing safely."
He nods. "Also Eru didn't have a word to say about it in his divine dictates on conduct, so there's that."
"That must help. Although religions in my world accumulate all sorts of cruft that isn't technically in their source text."
"Here too, actually. It would technically be possible to have a society that believed it was evil for two men to have sex that didn't consider the implication a dire insult, or didn't build in the other assumptions. Not that I'm particularly enthusiastic about convincing people to be originalists about the divine law..."
"Bad plan," agrees Cam. "Trajectory in my world involved people secularizing or just being hypocrites."
"Trajectory in our world's going to involve an alternative to resurrection and then I think very quickly everyone'll stop caring what the Valar say. And if they don't, once the war's over I can nudge them along."
"Or we lose and die and spend a few thousand Years in Mandos, that's also on the table."
"And not even the worst thing on the table." He frowns at Finwe's chip. "Can you keep it somewhere secure, for someday if it's safe?"
"Secure like 'on my planet' or secure like 'embedded in my arm or something'."
"He's only one person. Whatever's convenient."
"I suppose I'm not going to my planet right this minute anyway -" He cuts into his forearm without apparent discomfort, tucks the chip in, waits a moment while it heals.
He shakes his head with amazement. "Thank you."
He is half-expecting Ossiriand to be in ruins, but it looks the same as they left it.
"Suppose I should just go tell the contents of the bunker the tale in person or text it?"
"Don't know, what's your next step?"
"Don't know. Tempted to try evacuating Mithrim, the poor bastards, with a non-oath filtration mechanism, but - I should probably save it."
"For people who don't have backups?"
"No, he specified Elves. I should probably save it for a better organized and hopefully larger population, who are not rigged to explode, who I can load onto ships and get out of here before he realizes what happened."
"How many are you thinking you could get in one wave?"
"Depends on whether they're set up in such a way that I can run my check at a leisurely pace in advance and then load them up confident there were no substitutions, and on whether any of them know how to pilot or on how hard it is to scale up the lightleaper design."
"King's got people on the latter problem, and we have VR pilot training programs that are pretty good...you could insert a chip the Enemy can't duplicate in everyone's fingertips, if chips persist in not being dangerous for us although drugs don't work very well."
"If," Cam agrees. "Although the brain chips are secure for reasons I can't duplicate in one in somebody's finger."
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