Dinner would be nice. He relaxes slightly while they eat.

She does too, though she's still pretty thoughtful. She doesn't strike up a conversation again, but spends the time between dinner and bed drawing if he doesn't interrupt.

He'll fall asleep again right after dinner.

And in the morning she gathers and boils another batch of eggs and drops most of them off with the Ñolofinwëans and takes the rest to the workroom.

Hey! We've got a setup that we think would make the settlement really safe without hurting anyone who attacked it, want to take a look?

Ooh, yes!

So he shows it to her. It has some portals internally to a safer, distant location, but it's mostly set up around their existing camp.

Not bad. I can set that up, sure.

You're amazing.

She chuckles. Well, I try.

Should we get started now? I do have some news, but I think your siblings will be more interested in it.

I can bounce it to them, what's the news?

I took Findekáno to my world yesterday to see if it's possible to get spell forms via osanwë, and it turns out to be. We got three new ones from one of the kobold tribes - one that only makes dim light, we'll probably be able to get a better version of that one elsewhere, and then one that lets me make spells that react to magic things - I can use that with the light spell to see magic - and one that lets me hide things from my world's kind of spells and maybe your world's, too.

Awesome. So the plan's to get more spell forms, if you can, and then figure out what's best to throw at the Enemy?

Something like that, and keep working on the plan to teleport them to an empty world until we come up with something better. Getting spell forms over osanwë makes someone a mage, though, so we'll need to wait until some decisions have been made about how that's going to be decided before we can do much of it.

How what's gonna be decided?

Who gets to learn magic. Findekáno seemed like a pretty obvious choice, but not everyone is going to be so straightforward.

Seems like pretty much everyone's safer if they can do magic, but you mentioned it's risky, so - everyone who wants to take the risk - or is it also time-consuming, then maybe it should be a specialty like metalworking...

Being a mage doesn't actually protect you much at all from other mages; having the ability to teleport to three or four different places is almost as good and still not very good. Plus we have to worry about what happens if the Enemy captures a mage with any kind of useful spell form.

So a specialty. Do mages benefit from working together, can they learn and practice new things and improve more quickly with other mages around...

Spell design would benefit from that, and it's a pretty big deal. The other parts of being a mage don't really. And talking to non-mages can help with spell design, too, just not as well since they won't really know how the magic works.

So maybe teams of five or so mages? So people don't lose too much time - there's so much to do - but they can help each other with spell design?

Sure. But then how do you decide who gets to be a mage in the first place, that's the real problem.

What skills do you need to be a good mage?

Depends on how you're going to be using the magic; I get a lot out of having a really good memory, but if I didn't I could work around that petty easily. Creativity, being good at thinking up new solutions to problems, being good at noticing patterns? That's not the main thing I'd worry about, though; being a mage with a dangerous spell form - and most of them are dangerous - is like walking around with a weapon all the time; I'm sure there're people you'd rather not let do that.

We tried to leave the people we wouldn't trust with a weapon in Valinor, and it ended up making everything worse than if we'd just brought them along.