I know, right? She doesn't even think realistic art is the most interesting thing she does. There's ones of all of us. My twenty-year-old self is crouching behind a tree watching a bird.

That sounds like the most adorable thing ever! I want to see!

So he shows them around to a different place in the garden where indeed a child is perched watching a bird. He's unusually still for a child that size, but other that that even up close it's hard to tell he's not a person.

I was right, cutest thing ever.

Wanna see the others?

Yeah!

Little Maitimo, bright red hair and a face so pretty he's easier to pick out as a sculpture, sits on a ledge with even littler Macalaure in his lap. Maitimo is gesturing, eyes alight. Macalaure is grabbing for one of his brother's braids.

Carnistir is hiding in a corner, pouting at them as if deeply disappointed to have been found there.

The Ambarussa are hiding in tree branches, peering down at them.

"I am deeply intimidated by your mother's talent."

"You can tell her as much, she'd be happy to point you at people to learn from! I'm sure we've been noticed tromping around and they've decided to let us continue doing so. Shall we go in?"

"Sure."

So he walks up to the house - archway, no door - and says "Hello, everyone! I got married. On purpose. I would like you to meet my wife and her sister."

There's a second's silence, and then someone careens around the corner and into Tyelcormo's arms. "You idiot! Nice to meet you both, what the Halls were you thinking - are they even Elves -"

"We're not, but he talked to Orome first and took care of the obvious reasons that would make it a bad idea."

"You not being Elves doesn't make it more of a bad idea, it's more, like, difficulty of guessing whether you'll in fact want to be married to someone ten thousand years from now! You not being Elves is just surprising because as far as I knew everyone in Valinor was an Elf."

"We are actually from an alternate universe! I have no idea what the fuck that snake thing was or how it brought us here but we don't really have anything to go back to."

And now the hallway is filling with people. "Alternate universe?" one of them demands.

"Yes," she says, deciding to rip the band-aid off. "Alternate universe with weird dream-based magic."

"What's it like? What's the population? Are there Elves there? Did Eru create it? Had the Valar heard of it? Dream-based magic? Do you have lucid dreamers?"

"Lucid dreaming is a thing, I'd never heard of Eru or the Valar before I came here and the subject didn't come up when I briefly met Orome, we don't have Elves, and the explanation I've been giving so far is that in our world, sometimes stuff just happens when you're having really intense dreams, and if you train at it you can learn to control that tendency while awake."

This is nowhere near satisfactory! There are hundreds more questions, though at some point a woman with a tired face at least has the courtesy to introduce everyone and offer them places to sit while being interrogated.

She wasn't expecting it to be satisfactory, she was expecting it to be introductory.

"Your sculptures are intimidatingly good," Imliss tells Nerdanel when she has the woman's name.

"I'm glad they left an impression! Do you sculpt?"

"A little, mostly in clay--I haven't made a serious study of it, because I was more focused on dreamshaping."

She nods. She looks like she might have more to say but it's interrupted by a barrage of more dreamshaping questions.

And after a few hours of this another person walks into the room. His prettiness is at least competitive with Tyelcormo's and the result might come down to how one feels about red hair, because he has a lot of red hair. "Oh, no," he says, "you fools, this is how you get Tyelcormo and his wife to spend the next ten years two hundred miles from here in a forest none but they can navigate."

"I told them not to tell you," Tyelcormo complains. 

"And they didn't! You should be less predictable if you don't want to be predicted."

Tyelcormo sputters. 

"What, has he gotten married on short notice before, because I got the impression that was impossible."