If she can do it at scale they can have a non-lethal means of stopping fights like Alqualondë, if anything like that ever happens again. If she does portals from a warmer area over their greenhouses, can they get more sunlight? If she does portals from somewhere with a different night-day cycle, can they grow plants that require Valinor's constant light?

There's scale and then there's scale, that one she'd have to cast individually but she can probably get quick enough with it to do one a second or so. If she knows ahead of time that it might be necessary she can cast it on people in a triggerable way, meaning they'll be pinned to some pre-set place and not where they are at the time. (Yes, she can pin them to an arbitrary place if she's casting in the moment, too, though it'll slow her down a little.) Also they realize that's a hex, right? She's mad enough to be designing hexes, yes, that totally is one.

Light through portals appears to work just fine but they should probably test it more carefully before assuming there's not something subtle wrong with it. She can totally import light from places with different day/night cycles, though.

They are definitely testing carefully. They are, it's quite clear, aggressively working themselves to the bone - they run over all their in-progress projects in case she has suggestions for how her magic can aid them -

In lots of cases she can. Any time a project requires things to be moved from one place to another, nearly. In one case she comes up with a particularly clever suggestion for using portals to make high-precision cuts; in another she realizes that the falling-rocks spell can be used to safely suspend things in midair if they can be flipped upside down with each teleport so they don't accumulate momentum.

Eventually she notices that none of their suggestions have involved casting helpful spells on people. Did your sibling mention that spellbearers are a thing?

He didn't. Spellbearers?

I can cast spells on people that they can control themselves. The very easiest to do is let someone teleport themselves or someone or something they're touching to someplace with a thought. Someone with a spell on them - particularly a helpful spell, though hexes technically count too - is called a spellbearer. The idea that we thought was good enough to make it worth coming here before they were healed up was a spellbearer spell, something to bring warriors back home automatically if they're too badly wounded.

That would be very good, yes. And something so no one can get captured by the Enemy...

Yes.

You okay? We're all kinda - coping by doing, you might have noticed...

I'm not sure how sustainable this is - I've never been mad like this before - but I'm okay for now; if I start having problems I'll do something about it. I do coping-by-doing too.

Alright. Magic defenses on the city, then...and he explains what they've got and how portals could be made to help - the walls can teleport away anyone who touches them, right?

Yup. Also the ground outside the walls, if they want that - can be set up with a trigger if they don't want that always on. She'll have to refresh the spells every so often, though, soil isn't the best substrate for spells. Also they need to specify where 'away' is, they can be various kinds of creative with that, bearing in mind that there's a chance for friendly people to accidentally trigger these spells.

Yeah, that occurred to me. 'into the lake' is one option, for making it hard to attack but not dangerous, or into another world somewhere from which we can see them and retrieve anyone who ended up there accidentally...

Need a safe enough world, for that. We still don't have a good way to check.

Can't do empty ones?

Empty of people, yes. But I don't know if gods count and I can't check for magic at all.

I think I'd take that chance. Most worlds without people probably haven't got gods.

All right. I can't directly target empty worlds, I have to find worlds and then check them for people, so I don't know how long it's going to take for me to have one. I'll work on it when I have time and I can do spells that drop people in the lake in the meantime.

Thanks.

Grin. No problem.

What else, let's see... portals for shooting through, portals for dropping things through, portals for putting people in different parts of the surrounding area...

Whether local magic can detect portals, which answers whether it's safe to portal into Angband directly...

It appears that it can't. She gives them a few portals that watch the room, though, for further testing.

It also occurs to her to check whether she can mage-sense through a portal by sticking a fingertip through it: yes.

And the Enemy's a Vala; we can't count on it that he can't sense them just because we can't. But still, it's something, might be worth a try after more experimentation.

Nod. I still don't know practically anything about how Valar work.

They only have physical forms if they want them, but damaging the physical form can injure them, especially if they've poured a lot of themselves into it. They think weirdly. They have a lot of magic but most of it works slow.