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don't touch me
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Confirmation reaches them in the spring that Elwing of Sirion has the Silmaril.

It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.

They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.

They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.

Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.

They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.

The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.

The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.
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Promise is flying alongside Verve, to be installed in the next court site. She is not Thorn's only project, sometimes he will go and leave Promise behind to be handled less creatively until he sends for her again, but today he wants her and so today she's going. She is not allowed to dawdle. She is not green enough to cry. She flies, enjoying to the extent she can her freedom of thought: she has not been set to the mixed blessing of studying, has not been creatively disloyal enough to trigger instructions to consume her brain with brute-forcing intractable arithmetic, is not being forced to tell her every secret as it marches across her mind in response to sharp-edged soft-voiced questions.

And then she hits the tear and she cannot go where she was told and she does not have general permission to fly. She can twitch her wings, which is enough to barely steer her fall. She can't even yell for help - this has to be the mortal world, she won't even be able to fix her last batch of injuries - when she hits the ground it twists her bad knee, jars her wrist when she pitches forward, but she manages with her little freedom of movement not to roll and aggravate any of the cuts and scrapes.

She is crouched still on the ground, breathing, moving her eyes but forbidden to lift her head.
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There is suddenly someone quite nearby and in terrible pain. It is almost certainly a trap, of course, but a creative one, and for a second Maedhros finds that it nearly moves him.

"Go out," he says, because others will be hearing that also, "and find who's left us a present." And ask her to keep the blind horror and anguish quiet - kill her if she wants to die -"never mind that," he says, "I'll go." It is almost certainly a trap and he is not inclined to be cautious with his life, but the Oath disagrees so he goes armored, and cautiously.

Her mind does not stop crying out. As he gets closer he can piece together some things about it.
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The pain's not exceptional. It's enough to be distracting, but she's had nastier. Breathing doesn't make it worse, her ears aren't ringing, her wings are fine. She's barely paying attention to that.

She's going to be stuck here till Thorn forgets her name, if nobody finds her, or if somebody finds her and she can't convince them to feed her and let her go. And then she supposes she gets to wander the mortal world until she chances upon another tear or an actual gate, and at least finding her continent again will be straightforward unless she takes so long to get back to Fairyland that the Queen's up and moved somewhere in that time. She weighs probabilities. Maybe she shouldn't go back - to the continent, anyway, she doesn't really want to spend the rest of eternity without sorcery. But oh she misses her tree. Thorn did not break her thoroughly enough to feel confident in making her use her tree for his purposes. It is probably still there, he probably didn't burn it down. She will just have to remember where it is and go back to it whenever she can, whenever that is.
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She has wings. She is crouching on the ground. He draws his sword. He does not approach for a moment, listening.

unless she takes so long to get back to Fairyland

till Thorn forgets her name

Her head is not a pleasant place to be but it is also a confusing one and he keeps lingering, wondering what kind of game this is, what reaction it is supposed to provoke from him. "Hello," he says.
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Twitch. She's not allowed to talk. She can wiggle a wing, make it clear she's not deaf? Wiggle. This is literally just some random mortal and she has no idea what he'll do with her but she can't exactly evaluate people for suitability as rescue masters from here can she.

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"Can I give you permission to speak? You have permission to speak, if so, and to stand, though not to come closer."

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Of course mortals don't know how this works. She twitches her other wing marginally more energetically. You can't just give random people permission to do things, wouldn't that be nice, every bad court would fall apart as soon as somebody walked by and yelled.

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"Okay. I cannot cancel your orders and this is a very very unsafe place for you to be helpless and unable to move. Do you want me to kill you?"

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...She can make facial expressions. Does he think she's a mortal? With wings? Do mortals ever have those, she thought they didn't. She twitches the wing now designated for negative answers. No, I don't want you to kill me, or swallow the sun, or time travel, I do not require anything literally impossible of you, you just need to feed me literally anything and say you rescind all my orders -

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Someone bring me food, he says, I don't think it matters what.

"Someone's bringing food," he says. And relaxes, marginally. "Can you explain how your laws work?"
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No because she can't TALK! - If he knew about food and asked someone to fetch some before he came out to find her why is he acting like he doesn't know what's going on? Does he know about fairies or not? Or do mortals come in 'super hearing', or has he got a broadear captive back wherever - no, if he had a broadear he'd know how fairies work -

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Oh, she hasn't realized - "I can hear your thoughts. You are broadcasting them, actually, so everyone nearby can hear them. I do not know about fairies, and asked for food only when you said it was required."

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

- and now she's brute forcing cube roots in her head. Do you get 9,805,344,209,101 if you multiply 20,000 by itself three times LET'S FIND OUT
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That is both a reasonable response and a familiar one. He does not volunteer this. He does not teach her how to shield ones mind properly. He stands there and works with the pieces he has. There are rules about how fairies work, rules that mortals wouldn't be expected to know but that they could learn, there are courts of fairies, feeding someone lets you rescind their orders -

- she cannot actually be permitted to wander around Beleriand, not if the portrait that is coming together is at all accurate. The right thing to do would be to send her to Círdan.

Someone comes running with food.
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It turns out you do NOT get 9,805,344,209,101 if you multiply 20,000 by itself three times, it's a substantial undershoot, she tries 21,000.

She has practice at this for some reason.
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He takes the food. "Do you want to eat something? I'm not leaving you here either way. The Enemy would be delighted to meet you."

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No she does not really want to stay here brute forcing cube roots forever because Thorn isn't here to get bored with that and decide it's time to make something worse or, less likely, better for a while -

- what's he going to do with her, he's reading her mind stop stop stop stop -

- she shivers violently, she can do that, it's not volitional, but she opens her mouth. She told Thorn when he asked her that leaving this avenue wide open was a security hole but he kinks on hand feeding so she's allowed to be hand-fed because nothing should ever obstruct Thorn from kinking on things, oh no -
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He feeds her. His hand is trembling quite violently, too. "Does that do it? You have permission to speak."

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She chews. She swallows. Mortal food tastes weird. "Yes that does it," she murmurs.

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"This continent is at war. The Enemy sends his forces out to roam it, take people prisoner, torture them, toy with them. I need to understand your capabilities. How do fairies work?"

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"Badly. I need you to stop reading my mind." now now now now stop stop stop stop.

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"I'm not listening to you right now. How specifically do fairies work?"

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"How can I tell, I need to be able to tell -" Especially if he wants her to think, she's astonished she managed to think as well as she did with Thorn making her talk but then at least she had a moment's warning before any specific privacy evaporated.

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"We don't do it constantly, it's considered rude. I was listening before because we did not have another avenue of communication. I won't do it again unless you're endangering people or I have reason to think you're serving the Enemy, and I'll warn you if so."

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Shiver. "Okay. Now that you've fed me I'm your vassal and you're the only person on hand - unless somebody else had a really strong specific claim to that specific piece of food before you gave it to me, maybe - who can rescind or supplement my orders. A lot of them are really uncomfortable and I would like to stop having them now. Please."

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"What are you going to do if I rescind your orders? Can you list them so I can evaluate them? Do any of them prevent you from harming and killing random people who come across you in the forest, and do I have any other form of assurance you won't do that?"

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"Not much because I'm severely injured and have nowhere in particular to be. I don't have all the exact wordings memorized but they include things like not currently being allowed to go anywhere or move significantly because I can't make meaningful progress towards where I was being sent, and if I think of an actual loophole in the orders I have to bite my tongue off and brute force cube roots until further notice by an authorized court member. My immobility pretty thoroughly prevents me from marauding the local mortals but I am not specifically ordered against it but I have no reason to want to."

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"I order you not to attack anyone, or otherwise arrange for harm to come to them. I order you not to communicate with the Enemy. I rescind all orders I didn't give you. I can eventually remove those as well but I strongly expect your arrival here is some sort of trap for me and I would need to be satisfied I wasn't putting people in danger."

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She relaxes, suddenly and all over, when the weight of Thorn's orders is lifted, and moves to sit in a less uncomfortable position. Her wings roll up against her back. She lifts her head to look at him. "I don't know who the Enemy is," she says.

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He sends a series of mental images. Her tension and misery are wearing at him and they're more scattered than he intended them to be.

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"What was that!"

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"The Enemy. I - I know his name, do your abilities allow you to use that for anything?"

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"- maybe. Is he a mortal too?"
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"I'm not a mortal, I don't know why you think that. And no, he's not, he's a Vala."

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"You look like a mortal," she says. "Mostly because you don't have wings and don't know how fairies work, admittedly, but what else would you be? I don't know what a Vala is so I don't know if they count."

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"I'm an Elf. Are there other things I should know about how fairies work, before I take you back to my fortress?"

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Shiver. "I don't know what else is important to you. I don't want to hurt anyone and nobody but you can make me. - Unless someone else feeds me. There's no fairy food here, if I eat anything that isn't straight out of your hand it'll vassalize me to whoever can claim the food."

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"Don't eat anything save our of my hand, then. Can you walk?"

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"Not very well even when I don't have a broken knee. I can fly. If you don't want me to fly I'd rather try to walk than be carried."

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He flinches. "Go ahead and fly. Do not try to escape - is that specific enough, or do I need to define a radius and ask that you stay within it?"

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"Specific enough to do what?" She flutters into the air.

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"Specific enough that there's no chance I look away for a second at some point and you're far away finding someone else to get to rescind your orders, general enough that I'm not constraining you from thinking about escape - if I give my word not to escape, that only constrains my actions, but if I give my word not to consider escape, I change my mind itself. Are you the same?"

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"Orders can make me think about something but cannot make me not think about something, or want something, or believe something. Why does your word do that?" Fucked up alternate universe gracewings? "I can't fly all that fast, I couldn't be out of earshot that quickly."
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Not really an answer. He cannot bring himself to say 'don't leave my side' even if it's obviously the safest thing to do. "Amon Ereb, where we live, is this direction." He starts walking.

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She flies along.

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The fortress is not glorious, but it is imposing, and it has thick walls and is very very safe. There are people milling anxiously around the ramparts. He explains as they approach. I don't know what she is. I do not think she is of Arda. Don't read her mind or at least don't indicate you've done so.

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She doesn't comment on the architecture. She just flutters along, keeping pace with him.

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They go inside. He points her to his study, which doubles as his and Maglor's rooms, there are too many of them crowded into the only fortress remaining to their people. "Do you want any other food? Drink? Clothes? Is the temperature tolerable?"

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"The temperature's fine. I don't know if you have anything that would fit me," she is after all five feet tall and winged, "but this dress should hold up for a while longer. I could use more food. Plants are better, I think mort- I think some people eat non-plants."

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And bring us something to eat. Something vegetarian.

"I have some questions. Answer truthfully and completely. If I say something like 'would you do this?' does that count? Or does it need to be more direct? If I ask you 'is there information you're withholding from me that I'd care about', do you have to use your best model of what I'd care about, can you rationalize? or change what I care about by suddenly doing something I care about significantly more?"
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Twitch. "If you say 'would you do this' and don't specify under what conditions it leaves me partly free to imagine conditions on my own but you couldn't accidentally let me to say I'd do something I'd never do. With that phrasing I could use my current model of what you care about, I wouldn't have to think hard about making sure it was good, but I couldn't deliberately worsen my model by anything other than carelessness; I could do anything I wasn't otherwise forbidden to do in the hopes of adjusting my model but I wouldn't have a very long window to do it in before I had to answer."

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"Am I going to cause you tremendous harm if I do the obvious thing, which is asking you to tell me everything you know in the order it should be of interest to me?"

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"Yes, even compared to a lot of the other things you might do with me."

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"Is there a way to get most of the value from that question while not causing you much harm?"

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"Yes, but how depends on what I'd think about your interests if I knew more about them."

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"We have been at war with the Enemy for more than five hundred years. We are losing. It is my expectation that within the next century he'll have killed everyone on the continent. I want him defeated but no longer command forces that have any hope of doing that. I have family; most of them are dead. I am sworn to the task of recovering something that was taken from us long ago, and I cannot do anything that makes me unable to do that task, or unable to do it well, and I cannot avoid it for too long. My concern with you is primarily for keeping you out of Enemy hands, but the Oath won't let me not use resources I have.

Are you trying to figure out a way to trick me into some kind of mistake that makes me vulnerable to you? If so, what have you thought of? If having a warning before I ask your thoughts reduces your distress, you can always delay answering questions like that for a few minutes."
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She takes a breath. She thinks for a moment. "Mutual vassalization is possible and if it were in place I'd be less afraid of you because vassals can't hurt their masters, although not by very much because plenty of things don't count as 'hurting'. If anybody mentioned your name I'd listen and remember it but I don't know yet what a good opportunity to learn it would look like. I'm currently free to speak and enforce orders if I obtain any vassals, of whom I presently have none at all, and I can also put my ears out if I get my hands on tools, which would make it prohibitively difficult to control me with orders, although my existing orders would stand and it wouldn't make me any more physically imposing. If you're under an oath like you described that means I have to think about this entire situation in terms of it being your master and thus mine at one remove and that affects how decent a master I can expect you to be on the general spectrum of people who keep slaves. It seems unlikely that you're a good source of unbiased information on someone who you've nicknamed 'the Enemy'."

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"You may not give anyone any orders. Do orders have to be spoken? Giving them telepathically doesn't count? If you can't give orders, what changes if you learn someone's name, do you have other forms of power over them?" He isn't willing to stop her from putting her ears out. "Mutual vassalization is not acceptable to me but I am more than willing to give my word not to 'hurt' you if by that you mean physical violence. Are there other commitments that would make this situation less harmful to you without putting my people at risk?"

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"Orders can be written if the vassal watches the master write it out but not at any degree of temporal remove. I don't know if telepathy counts but it probably does. If I can't enforce orders then the only thing someone being my vassal changes is whether they can hurt me or not and whether we can feed each other without adding new claims on the fed party. I - I don't want to be touched. Or ordered to hurt myself or anyone else. Or deprived of sleep. Or addressed by name even if you make me give my name which doesn't give you anything you don't already have unless you want to turn me over to another fairy, food works fine for nonfairies, are you sure you're not mortals you said the Enemy was going to kill everyone? If you're going to try to use me for any mental work more complicated than answering basic questions like this I will function better if I have time to - draw. If anybody ever finds a gate to Fairyland you probably won't let me go and get a cutting from my tree, will you."

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"I will not touch you, or let anyone touch you, or order you to hurt yourself." He does not promise not to order her to hurt other people. There is a Silmaril, there is an Oath, they are moving towards Sirion as slowly as they can but they are headed there. "Or deprive you of sleep, or address you by name. You can draw. We don't have much paper but you can certainly use it. I cannot think why I wouldn't let you go and get a cutting from your tree, is there a reason I ought to hesitate to do that?"

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"The gate might not be anywhere near it. I'd be away a long time finding it and bringing the cutting back and if there was a loophole in my orders I'd have time to find it and if you gave me a self-incapacitating contingency for that case I'd be hard to collect."

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"I do not actually want a prisoner and am not trying to close loopholes so that you cannot escape me. I think the tree is fine. Do you require rest or - drawing time, I suppose - right now?"

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"Depends on what you mean by require."

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"Okay. I'll leave. I'll come back in the morning. Don't leave the fortress or hurt people in it. If you think of a loophole that lets you do something that I would have intended to forbid when I asked you not to leave the fortress or hurt people in it, please tell me about it then. This is a horrifying solution and if you are rested enough to think I would greatly appreciate thoughts on less horrifying ones."

He stands. A bit unsteadily.
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She shivers. She looks for somewhere to go lie down.

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There's a bed. There's a fireplace next to it.

He leaves and goes to Maglor's room and curls up in a ball on the floor. 'on the general spectrum of people who keep slaves', he says to Maglor when he comes in. 'on the general spectrum of people who keep slaves.'
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Promise curls up in the bed.

She manages to sleep.
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He would love to avoid her until the Oath drowns out all else but by then he'll be much much less safe to be around. He finds some plant-based things. He goes back upstairs. He knocks on the door.

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She's awake by then. She looks dubiously at her knee and more dubiously at the ceiling clearance. "Um, you can come in?"

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He does. "How are you? There's an important constraint I didn't mention yesterday. Delaying action on an Oath numbs all the things you care about that aren't the Oath, after a while you can't want anything else or remember exactly why you did. We are not going to delay action on the Oath that far, but the next action it demands of us is terrible so we have been delaying. That means it may be wise for me to find a solution with you that's safe for all parties, in the next few weeks, and then commit myself to it before I lose sight of it. Otherwise I would be inclined to leave you alone for much longer. I still can."

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"I'm rested, my injuries are going to take a long time to heal without sorcery but they're not so bad I can't think around them, this is still probably a lot better than having arrived where I was going when I went through the tear. I do need to eat, just avoiding me isn't a great idea," she points out. "I can get by without much but not comfortably. ...what are you thinking in terms of a, a solution with me...?"

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"I have food. I want to make sure you don't end up in Enemy hands and don't go flitting around making slaves of everyone who gives you their name, those are the only really important features of a solution but they need to be airtight." He puts his head in his hands. "If you could help us that would also be good but I think we are beyond helping."

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"You said you knew the Enemy's name," she says. "I don't know how to best keep me out of his hands if I don't know if that would even work or not. I don't want to keep slaves. I had a vassal once because a mortal was stuck in Fairyland and she was starving and Thorn caught us both before I could gate her home. That's the only one. You can phrase it as a question if you want to be surer of my honesty."

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"Have you lied to me about anything since you got here?"

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"I don't remember everything I said to you since I got here but I don't think so and I am sure I haven't lied to you today."

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"Okay. Food? I have to personally hand it to you?"

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"And I can't actually hold it either, I have to eat it out of your hand."

She is quite adept at doing this without any person to person contact as long as he holds the food right.
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He is also very very much in favor of that. He is staring fixedly at the wall and does not actually notice when she's done eating.

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Eventually the food's gone. She can put it all away after as long as she's been without, no problem.

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"Okay. Strategic information relevant to you not ending up in the hands of the Enemy. This world was created by the Valar. They are very powerful and have very powerful magic and one of them enjoys torturing people and has expanded from doing so recreationally to doing so millions-at-a-time while he does some kind of obscure long-term magic that will probably make this continent a power base for his eventual war with the others. They can read minds, like us, only moreso, and if you were in the Enemy's hands he would figure out how to use you and it would be a disaster. You being in my hands is also a disaster for all innocent people, but less of one, I don't torture them."

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"Moreso?"

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"There are ways to protect against us. I'll teach you them, they take months of practice but they're possible. Some of the Valar can, if they have you, read out your entire life and what you were thinking at each minute of it."

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She swallows. "How do I protect against your kind, at least?"

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"You develop the habit of a mental distinction between public thoughts and private thoughts - you usually need to use some kind of visual or spacial analogy for it - and develop the habit of folding your thoughts into the private side. With practice you'll be able to do it automatically."

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"It takes months?"

- she imagines thinking in her tree. No one can get her tree if she doesn't let them. She has never as it happens been forced to let anyone in.
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"Takes most people months. If you're motivated it can go faster."

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She is motivated. (In her tree. She doesn't have to come out, nobody can make her -)

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"Since you asked me to stop listening to you, I can't actually comment on whether it's working."

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"- if that's the only way to tell if it's working I'd rather know."

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A minute's silence. "I can tell that you're thinking, but not specifically what you're thinking. Depending on the metaphor you're using, sometimes there's an obvious way to fold your presence itself into the secret -"

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Tree is sealed up. She and her wings can breathe together indefinitely, no windows no doors until she wants them nobody can see -

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"That's the idea, yes. It usually takes a while to get the hang of keeping it when you're distracted or startled, so I'll continue not listening."

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"Thank you."

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He flinches, again.

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...She isn't sure whether to ask. She is hardly the party who gets to ask intrusive questions here.

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"Did you think of ways to circumvent my intent that you not leave and not hurt anyone?"
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"No. I didn't even leave the room, although you only said I shouldn't leave the fortress."

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"I brought drawing paper." He hands it to her. "I have books, do you know how to read? Are you an adult of your species?"

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"I can read just as I can speak, and my kind of fairy doesn't have children."

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"Great. Then, the books are in my brother's room, the next one over. They have names in them. Truthfully and completely, is there anything you can do with names while the order not to give any orders is in place?"

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"I could use them to figure out what sorts of sounds you use in names and figure out more names."

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"And is there anything you could do with the more names?"

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"If there were more fairies around I could tell them the names."

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"No telling other fairies any names you know. Anything else?"

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"I guess I could write the names down all together instead of spread out in the books."

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"No causing other fairies to have easier access to the names. If I give you my name can you use it to control me in any way? Would it interfere with any orders I give you?"

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"Not if I can't enforce orders," she says.

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"And is it the case that you can't enforce orders? Did the order I gave you suffice for that?"

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"I think it worked, but I can't actually tell the difference between an enforced order I'm following or have no opportunity to disobey and an unenforced one under the same conditions."

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"What's the difference between giving an enforced order and an unenforced one?"

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"Meaning to enforce it. It's not audible or anything."

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"Do not give anyone orders. Do not give any other fairies names so they can give orders; Tell me if there are other fairies trying to do that, and stop them if they do it to me." Intent might not be audible but he says it rather forcefully anyway. "Yesterday we were trying to make progress on the questions of which variants on a general demand for information I could make without harming you."

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"I don't mind telling you how fairies work. It's - stuff about me personally that I don't want to talk about as much. I don't know if you're going to be trying to use me as a strategist or just a fairy, that makes a difference."

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"You'd have five hundred years of situational information to catch up on to be useful as a strategist. If you find it more objectionable to be asked to think about problems for me I can -" he flinches - "just use you as a fairy. You do not have to tell me anything personal. If you want to ask compensation for telling me things or doing things for me, I can do that."

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"Being under orders to think about a thing is - unpleasant. Being asked to think about a thing isn't. I don't know what I'd ask for. You don't have my tree. You don't have a gate. You're letting me have books and paper and everything."

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"In that case I will ask you to think about things but not order it. You could ask for songs, if you like music, or for different varieties of food or company or so forth. I am not good company, not reliably."

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"I'm not accustomed to having good company. I don't know if I like it particularly. Music's all right. I don't know what mortal foods taste least weird yet."

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The Oath doesn't have anything to say about his next thought but he's not at all sure it doesn't - well -

"I have something to ask you to think about, but it is upsetting and you seem like perhaps you need some space and time."
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"Upsetting how?"
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"It will involve telling you about a bad situation that I expect you will want to avert, and I expect you will anticipate how I might use you in the situation and I expect that'll scare and anger and -" he shrugs - "I don't know enough about your temperament."

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"Well," she says, "are you going to do it anyway?"

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"If I can't think of a better solution and no one can stop me, yes."

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"...is someone likely to try to stop you?"

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"Lots of people will certainly try to stop me, but I have better weapons than them and more experience fighting."

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"If you're going to use me on something horrible anyway I would rather have warning and a chance to think of less horrible ways to do it."

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"The thing I am sworn to retrieve is held by a young mortal woman who is the ruler of a settlement to the south of here. It's not even really a settlement, more of a refugee camp, filled with the survivors of the collapse of the last kingdoms on this continent. And their children. The Enemy hasn't attacked it yet, perhaps because it's not worth his time, perhaps because he expects me to do it. I have asked her to give back the thing I am sworn to retrieve. She has told me to come and get it. We have an army. We are going to do that."

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"Why doesn't she want to give it to you?"

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"Before she held it, her father did. We made the same request of him, for the same reason, and he refused. He thought that its blessings would protect his kingdom from the Enemy. They might have done so, for a little while. We attacked her father's kingdom. Her father, her mother, and her brothers, who were young children, were killed in the fighting. As were many tens of thousands of other innocent people. So now she hates us and is eager for us to ride to war so she can avenge them."

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"I don't really have a good grasp on the significance of children as mortals - or whatever you are, but it keeps sounding like you can die - have them. Or even as breeder fairies have them, but I assume that's different."
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"Killing children is considered very wrong because they are very small, and defenseless, and cannot hold weapons or harm anyone. In this world 'mortal' is used to mean people who will die after a certain span of years - we are immortal in that we will never age and can live all the lifetime of the world, but if you drive a sword through us in the right place our body still can be damaged beyond the capacity to sustain us. Does that not happen for you?"

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"No. I can't die."

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"So what would happen if your body was damaged very badly, or thrown into molten rock, or ground to dust by a powerful enemy?"

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"I'd heal eventually if there was a big enough piece. I don't know exactly what would happen if there wasn't but I wouldn't die."

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"We can get new bodies, but it takes a long time and leaves us prisoners of the Valar. These bodies can suffer wounds they do not heal from. I - thought my people were unfortunate. I'm sorry."

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"I usually don't want to die."

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"I was taking some solace in the thought I hadn't prohibited you from it, and wouldn't. But. We can die. When we attack the refugee camp of Sirion many people will die. I don't know if you consider that a bad thing, but here it's considered one."

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"I don't want anybody else to die either if they don't want to."

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"Right. So. If I am somehow stopped from attacking Sirion, or if the Silmaril is retrieved such that I don't have to, then no one dies."

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"And you want to send me in to tell her to hand it over."

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"That is the most obvious solution."

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"I assume you have her name."

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"I do."

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"If you give it to me are you going to use me to make her do anything else?"

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"Get you out of the city safely, maybe. It's all in vain if you don't actually get the Silmaril back here. Otherwise no."

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"Somebody whose name you don't have might interfere with me on my way in or out."

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"No one knows that names can be used in this manner, I could try to get the names of most of the people who could interfere. But yes. The city has defenses and even with Elwing's agreement I'm not sure you could get in or out of them unimpeded."

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"If this were Fairyland I could turn invisible, but it's not."

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"You could arrive at Sirion as a refugee. They take people in. You could avoid telling anyone that you met me first, or how you work, or that you're anything other than a girl with wings. You could learn the names you needed, order Elwing to give you the Silmaril, and leave."

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"Would that take long enough that it would be conspicuous that I wouldn't eat or drink anything?"

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"Not if you arrived with food you could feed yourself, or does even that not work? Or you could ask to eat and drink in private, citing trauma - people certainly are familiar with that."

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"It doesn't work. It might be worth the risk if you happen to personally keep a garden and use seeds you harvest yourself every year."

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"Haven't had much time for gardening. Are there other things you would expect to go wrong with this plan?"

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"Assuming no one force feeds me or incapacitates me - I don't think I'm much harder than a mortal to render unconscious except no amount of drowning will do it - and I have the names of enough people that they can prevent everyone whose name I don't have from shooting a hole through my wing or anything - I don't suppose there's any obvious reason it wouldn't work."

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"I know a few hundred names," he says, "of people who ought to be there, most of them important people. If I tell you the name will you fit it to the person when you see it, or do I need to send you names and faces?"

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"I have to know which person you mean - faces would do it - and entertain the correct hypothesis about their name and then I'll know if it's right or not."

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"How badly am I hurting you if I order you to do this?"

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"Depends on how free a hand I have to order the people intelligently as opposed to on a rigid plan, and whether you continue to intend to leave them alone after you have your thing. I don't - I don't intrinsically object to having names, all that does by itself is make it so they can't hurt me - and I'm assuming they'd rather not die -"

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"I think they'd rather not die. You can ask them. I will need to talk this over with my brother but I currently intend to order you to do whatever you think retrieves the Silmaril best, not to do anything more specific, and I can promise to leave them alone once the Silmaril is in our hands."

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"I don't understand why you're under the oath to get the Silmaril in the first place but as long as you are this is better than massacring them."

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"We were very young and naive and thought it was only our own lives we were staking. Thank you." He stands. "Do you prefer that I tell you when I'll be back when I leave, or give you some notice when I'm returning, or what?"

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"Notice would be nice."

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"All right." And he walks away.

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She draws for hours.

And then she goes to have a look at the books.
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The books are very pretty and all very old. Most of them are technical reference books.

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References for how to technically do what?

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Glassblowing, syntax and language, metalworking, magic metalworking. The author has put his name inside the books. It is Curufinwë Fëanáro.

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She was not forbidden to think about names. Second half of the first name goes snap.

Syntax and language is bewildering; mortals talk weird. She is interested in the magic metalworking though.
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No one interrupts her until evening, when he comes back with food. He sees her engrossed in the books. "Learned my name?"

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"Yes."

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"If you ever ever figure out a way to use it to take me prisoner, or a way to help someone else do that, I order you not to do it and to warn me immediately. If you ever figure out a way to communicate it to someone else I order you to stop them from getting it by any means necessary. If someone else has it, stop them from taking me prisoner. If you cannot stop them from taking me prisoner, kill me."

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"I literally cannot kill you even if you order me to."

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"Then get me the means to kill myself, or order someone who can to do it."

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Twitch.

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"If there's something I'd be interested in hearing on that topic, say it."

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"I don't want to have to order anyone to kill you."

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"I don't want to be taken prisoner."

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"And what I want doesn't enter into it, so if there is literally anyone available who can kill you and you can't do it yourself I will, of course, unless I'm entirely out from under you, tell some let's say small child to do it if by any means I can gain the ability to order them to do things -"

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"It's awful. Which is why I am unwilling to have it happen to me no matter the cost. I promise you that I actually do think ordering a small child to kill me is on the whole less psychological trauma for everyone involved than me continuing to be a fairy prisoner."

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"So should I assume in the future that this does not count as something that would interest you?"

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He buries his face in his hand. He's quiet for a long moment. "No. Your wellbeing interests me; pointing out when orders will have a very high cost to you is important to me, knowing what tradeoffs I am making is important. You shouldn't expect that I am willing to trade some probability of being a fairy prisoner off against any other good except a Silmaril, though."

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"I doubt there are going to be other fairies around for the foreseeable future. This doesn't seem to be the mortal world as it was described to me by the mortal I met. It must be some other world. Which means no one's gating to it."

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"I'm glad. I'm sorry you can't get your tree cutting."

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Sigh.

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"We discussed the orders. Do any problems come to mind with this order: 'go to Sirion. Do whatever you believe is likeliest to result in you returning with the Silmaril. Do not give orders to anyone for any reason other than protecting yourself and getting the Silmarils, and use orders that are minimally constraining towards that end.'"

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"Yes. Temporary but constraining orders are not 'minimally constraining' but they are often faster to say and safer to rely on. If I go through a lot of convolutions to remove all unnecessary constraint, then anyone who can't remember what I said may be stuck trying to remember my wording and unable to do anything else besides try to remember the order until they're released by a new permission. I wouldn't consider it 'protecting myself' to avoid being revassalized if I met someone who seemed likely to be a pleasanter master than you and they offered an opportunity, and they might or might not be able to convince me not to bring you the Silmaril anyway. If people are alarmed when anyone whose name I know acts on my orders they may attack their allies and this phrasing doesn't let me interfere effectively. I could easily consider it protecting myself to give you orders. You didn't specify I had to give you the Silmaril, just return with it, and I'm pretty sure that would give me a lot of leverage you don't want me to have. The order would be better if you put the first sentence last instead, because recency takes precedence, but it's still sloppy and you'd be better off giving me a simple permission to leave the fortress and to order people who I encounter in Sirion for the next day or however long you want to give me and then relying on me not wanting people to be massacred for everything else. I'm good at this crap, I learned from the best."

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"Truthfully, do you expect that giving you a simple permission is the best way to achieve my goals? And I order you not to accept food or drink from anyone else or tell them your name, you're right, that one is obvious."

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"That plus an order that if I am in possession of a Silmaril I must bring it to you. It is the best way to achieve your goals if they are as I understand them and no one in Sirion is going to convince me that you won't really massacre them."

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"I have no idea how persuadable you are. There are people in Sirion who witnessed the fall of Doriath. There are lots of people who can tell you how oaths work. If you are in possession of a Silmaril, bring it to me. You can leave the fortress for two days and have to return here at that time if you can do so safely. You can give orders to people in Sirion but not orders that extend more than a day after you've left the city."

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"I would probably also benefit from more information about the place if you can tell me. And I still don't have the names."

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So he pulls out maps, shows her where they are and where Sirion is. "The population is a mix of survivors of the fall of Gondolin, the fall of Nargothrond, and the fall of Doriath. The ruler is Idril, who was the princess of Gondolin. Her true name is Itarillë," He's sending images of faces. "I haven't seen her since she was a child, I'm sure she's changed. Her husband is Tuor. Her son Eárendil is married to Elwing. They have two young children, Elrond and Elros." And so on.

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The names click as they go by, when they're the right ones. Promise is quiet and attentive.

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"Are you planning to use any of this information to hurt these people, beyond what's necessary to get the Silmaril and get out safely?"

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"No."

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"All right. Do you expect that you'll be back in two days?"

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"I don't know, how far away is it? What are they going to think of me having wings?"

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"Two hundred miles. The wings will make them very anxious; they will probably assume that you are a minor Maia, but Maiar can't swear falsely and if you swear you have never served the Enemy they'll probably trust you. I don't suppose there's a way to hide the wings."

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"I guess they might go under a coat or something but I couldn't fly like that. What's a Maia?"

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"The Valar are the powers who created this world. The Maiar are less powerful versions of the same thing. The important thing is that all non-mortals in our world cannot swear falsely, so if you swear you don't serve the Enemy you'll be trusted on that."

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"Okay."

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"Truthfully, how likely do you think it is that you'll be back within six days? And do I need to keep reiterating 'truthful and complete' or can that stand?"

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"It stands, and if it didn't, uttering a question like that wouldn't help. I can fly two hundred miles in a few hours. If nothing interrupts me, I don't make some catastrophic social error that puts everyone on guard, and the Silmaril is actually there six days sounds like plenty."

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"How likely?"

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"I don't understand what terms you want that answer in. I don't know how likely any of the things that could obstruct me are."

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"If those are the only things you expect to obstruct you then we're fine." He sighs. "This is horrifying. All right. You have, as discussed, permission to give people orders in Sirion, though not orders that will be in place for more than six days. If you get a Silmaril, bring it to us."

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"Which way is it? What does it look like?"

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He points it out on the map. "It looks like a refugee camp at the mouth of a river."

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"I've never seen a refugee camp," she points out.

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"Houses that have been built quickly. Lots of people in very little space."

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"Okay. Anything else I should know?"

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"Nothing else comes to mind. You are small enough to claim to be a child, if you do think of a way to hide the wings, and as I said we hesitate to hurt children."

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"I have no idea what children act like."

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"Do you have any idea what the Eldar act like? I am not typical."

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"No, I don't know that either. And I'm not sure exactly how long ago it was I last met a mortal of a different kind..."

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"You could always say that you are a fairy from fairyland, and not explain that this lets you command people."

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"I suppose."

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"If you think more information will improve your chances of success, I can introduce you to people who are better at behaving in a manner typical of the Eldar."

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"I think trying to pass for one is not going to be my best plan. I'm missing too much background knowledge."

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"I agree. Some of the Maiar don't interact with Elves or Men much, if that helps."

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"I'll probably let them think I'm a Maia. What does swearing sound like if they want me to do that?"

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"You just say 'I swear before Manwë and Varda - you don't even have to say that, but people usually do - that -' and then whatever they're asking. Mortals can do it falsely."

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"Okay."

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"Are you okay? You do not have to answer personal questions truthfully or completely."

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"I have been both worse and better."

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"Yeah," he says, "me too, though this is close to the worst. Okay. Good luck - what do you want me to call you?"

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"My nickname is Promise. What about you?"

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"In these lands I'm known as Maedhros."

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"That doesn't click, if you ever meet another fairy it's safe to introduce yourself that way." Sigh. "I should probably leave when I have recently both slept and eaten."
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"It's evening. I can bring you food again in the morning and keep staying in my brothers' rooms."

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"Okay."

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"Good night." And he leaves.

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She sleeps. Murmuring random words.

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In the morning he brings food and stiffly feeds it to her without any physical contact. "You ready?"

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"Suppose so."

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"If you had my goals and were in my position, are there other orders you would give?"

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Promise considers this. "Hypothetically how much do I trust me?"

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"I was reading your mind until I asked you to stop; I believe that you are what you say you are but not that you share my goals at all. And my goals are not the same as 'the set of things I am bound to try to achieve'."

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"I mean in terms of wanting to prevent massacres and such. If I were sending a vassal who is more hostile than I in fact am to do this I'd go with tighter orders, the flexibility drawbacks just otherwise outweigh the security advantage."

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"I believe that you sincerely prefer to prevent a massacre. I am not clear on whether you'd let one happen in order to get free of me but I don't think you'll have the chance to do that. Even if there were a fight at Sirion it would almost certainly not kill me."

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"Then the order set I've got is probably right, barring something too obvious for you to mention or me to ask about obtaining at Sirion which will derail everything."

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He nods. "Nothing comes to mind, but I suppose the point is that it wouldn't. I have dealt with peoples of three different species and many different nations, I don't think much strikes me as too obvious to mention."

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"Okay. Then - off I go, I guess." She frowns at her knee, tries to bend it, sighs. "Does the window open?"

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He opens it.

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And she flies out of it and heads for Sirion.

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She is there before the sun reaches its height in the sky. It is easy to recognize. Lots of people in too little space at the mouth of a river, indeed.

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She lands near its edge and looks around, favoring her bad knee.

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And people come running over to meet her. Some of them have bows drawn. All of them look very anxious and very wary. "Who are you?" someone says.

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"I'm called Promise."

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More wariness. "Egnor," he says. It clicks. "What are you?"

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"Injured and not thrilled that people are waving weapons at me. I'm not here to hurt anyone."

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"The servants of the Enemy would say that also," he says. "How were you injured? Where are you from?"

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"I swear before Manwë and Varda that I have never been in the Enemy's service," she says firmly, "but I don't want to talk about how I was injured or where I'm from."

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And they relax. "All right. We have healers, if you want we can carry you in, or get them to come take a look at you out here..."

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"I can fly to them," she says. "I'd rather nobody try to carry me. Where are they?"

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"If you can just fly along with us I can take you there."

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She flutters into the air again.

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And he leads her into the city. The healer looks surprised, but not particularly alarmed. "Hello. I'm Linaewen, can I help you? I mostly heal Men and Elves..."

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"I don't know if you can help me or not but it seemed worth a try."

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"By all means! Sit down, have something to drink or to eat if you'd like, and I'll take a look at it. What's your name, dear?"

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"I'm Promise." She doesn't have anything to drink or eat. She sits. She wonders if she can find out where the Silmaril is by acting like she landed here with the power of speech in the first place and listening; she has some time. Seems worth a try. Maybe she won't have to alarm anyone until the point where she's flying away.

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The healer starts singing. It does help. Not nearly as much as sorcery, and it takes a lot longer, but it does help.

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Oh that's better. And what a pretty song.

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She's delighted to see that it has an effect. "I should take a break, dear, but someone else can come in and do that for you again this afternoon. Do you have people to stay with? Do you need to talk with anyone? Lots of people here have been through scary things, we are happy to talk about them..."

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"I don't actually know anyone here. I'd - rather not talk about it though."

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"That's all right. We can find you someone to stay with. A place by the cliffs, maybe, since you can fly."

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"Okay. Um, who's in charge here?"

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"The Lady Elwing, Lúthien's granddaughter, and Eärendil son of Idril and Tuor."

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Nod. "Thank you."

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She sings a little while later, once she's had some tea and offered Promise some, and then someone else comes in with an injury and she heads off to look at that.

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Promise can walk without feeling like she's making her knee worse now! She totters outside to see if Elwing is just conveniently walking down the street or living in a particularly nice refugee tent or anything.

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Elwing lives, she is told, in the palace. It's an under-construction palace but still quite elaborate. Is Promise from Doriath? Elwing likes to meet her people.

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Promise is not from Doriath but she is a new person.

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With twin toddlers the Queen is very busy but eventually no doubt Promise can meet her.

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That would be nice.

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Does Promise have a place to live? The space is very full but she might know someone who knows someone who knows someone who has an empty bed.

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Promise does not have a place to live. She might not stay long term, she'd hate to impose and she's not used to crowds, but a bed for a bit would be lovely.

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She really should stay, nowhere else on the continent is safe save for servants of the Enemy. It's no imposition, we're all in this together. But certainly a bed they can do.

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That's very kind of them.

She lets herself be steered around; she is not in enough of a time crunch to make it really obvious that she wants to talk to Elwing on a deadline.
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And they find a bed for her, and offer her food but don't seem distressed when she refuses it, and almost everyone introduces themselves by name.

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Convenient.

She sleeps.
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Does she do anything? Sewing, fishing, building? Lots of projects would love her help if she can help, though if she's still recuperating of course no one will insist, it's just that some people find it helpful for their recovery to start doing helpful things.

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She can sew, although she is mostly accustomed to doing with leaves, as with what she is wearing.

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Does she have some kind of magic that makes it not fall apart? If so, people would like that. Here people do not make clothes out of leaves because they rip and die.

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Maybe they're just different leaves. Anyway, she assumes the underlying principles of stitching hold.

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They do! People are happy to bring her fabric to sew things.

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So she sews some things. On the pretense of not wanting to get too absorbed in stitching, is Elwing likely to want to meet her soon?

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She's only half-Elf, you know, but that's still half-Elf, and she's got the children, it might be months. Is it important that they meet sooner?

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If possible.

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Someone will ask someone who will ask someone who is helping build the palace.

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Promise appreciates that. And everyone is being so kind about her privacy. She appreciates that too.

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Lots of people here don't want to talk about the past. Elwing watched her city destroyed and everyone killed, Eärendil did too, it's very common. It'll be all right. They'll cling here together in Sirion until the end however it comes.

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What a depressing world this is. The mortal world's supposed to be nicer; she supposes this isn't the mortal world that is supposed to be nicer.

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It was nice before the war. So they've heard. The war's been on more than five hundred years.

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Anyway, if she lightly implies that it is maybe important for secret reasons that she talk to Elwing can she get an appointment before she's impaired by hunger?

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Someone can take her up to the palace and they can wait there'd see if there's an opening.

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Sounds good.

What fraction of the people around does she have names for?
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She has the names of about a third of the people in the palace.

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Okay, that'll probably do if there's some kind of emergency, but she keeps an eye out while waiting.

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And eventually a young woman, looking exhausted, comes out to meet her. "Promise! I heard that you'd, ah, landed here and needed to speak with me. Do you need to speak with me?"

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"Yes, I do, I'm really sorry about the intrusion. Can we have privacy?"

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"Certainly." And she gestures her into a side room.

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"Are you sure no one can hear us here?"

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"They shouldn't, no. What's wrong? Is there a message from the Valar?"

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"Wait," says Promise, apologetically. It's gentler than 'stop'; Elwing will still be able to breathe. "I'm very sorry about this but I need the Silmaril. Exclusively truthfully and exclusively to me, tell me what I need to know to take it away without any fuss."

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She looks confused, then angry, then terrified. Then - "it's in a locked box in my room. I wear the key on my necklace. It glows even in the box, it doesn't glow too visibly if you wrap it with thick fabrics before you put it in the box and wrap the box. Everyone will try to stop you. I could tell them you're allowed but I don't think they'd believe I wasn't being somehow coerced, there'd certainly be a fuss. If you flew out over the water with it I'm not sure anyone'd realize what was going on, not if I told them I'd just given you some food for your people or something bulky like that."

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"Will people notice right away if you're missing the key? How confident are you that you can sell the 'food' story until I'm out of bow range?"

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"People will notice I was missing the key. I can convince them of the story but they'll notice something's wrong with me, they'll see - they'll hear -" she's clearly trying to move.

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"I'm really really sorry about this. How heavy is the box when wrapped up enough not to be identifiable?"

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"Fifteen, maybe twenty pounds."

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"Carrying that I can fly maybe forty-five miles an hour. Can you reliably keep anybody from shooting at me long enough for me to get away?"

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"I think so. If I distract them, tell them that it's urgent news and they should come in here so we can speak privately, make something up..."

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"And you can do that after giving me the Silmaril and the key?"

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"I can give you the key. I don't know how we'd get up to my room without suspicion. That'd make it harder to convince them you don't have the Silmaril."

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"Is there anything else you keep there that you could invent an excuse to show me? Do you have a window, would anyone be watching the window from the outside?"

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"No one watches the window but plenty of people might see it. I don't keep anything I'd be sending off with a stranger in my room."

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Damn the lack of sorcery. "Could you realistically go and get it so I wouldn't have to go to your room or would that be just as conspicuous?"

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"That would be less so, but only a little less so, and someone might stop me and see that it's a Silmaril. If you went up with me to see it, and then out through the window? And the people who I told that you were going up to see it were in the palace, and I ordered them to a secret meeting before a cry went out that you were flying off?"

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"How confident are you that would work?"

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"I don't know. It might. You could come play with the children while I slipped off and got it, I take it out to show them sometimes, and then - I can't think without moving."

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"How much do you need to move to think effectively?"

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"Usually I walk on the beach. I don't know."

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"To the extent this will be inconspicuous to people outside you may pace in this room."

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She doesn't stand up. "I don't want to think effectively."

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"I am trying to get the job done as gently as possible. I don't want to have to do this to anyone besides you or micromanage you uncomofortably, but if I have to, I can. I recommend cooperating."
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"I am cooperating. I am not standing up to think of a better plan. There isn't. I gave you plans."

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Sigh. "Which do you think has the best chance of success by my standards?"

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"I don't know. I could move it now to some other location, you could pick it up from there later when there's no suspicion. Then I could tell people I'm giving you food to take back to yours, so when you do fly off no one sees."

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"Okay. Where will you put it?"

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"The children have a play yard, I can put it there."

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"Where is it?"

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"Opposite side of the palace, sort of a courtyard except the back is still under construction."

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"Okay. What will the bundle look like?"

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"Heap of laundry, probably, covered in fishing net."

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"Not 'probably'. I need to be able to recognize it. When would be the least suspicious time for me to collect it?"

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"In an hour or two, when I can have had time to tell everyone I gave you food to take back to your people."

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"All right. When I've left this room, act normally except insofar as is necessary to plant the Silmaril, the described bundle around it sufficient to conceal it, and the key to its box without any suspicion you can possibly evade or defuse. As necessary to maintain the fiction but not extraneously or in any tellingly irregular manner, tell people I am taking food that you offered me. If anyone is suspicious enough to make trouble in the relevant time frame, telepath me their name and face and what's going on in as much detail as I would need to find them and address the situation informedly. Continue to minimize suspicion until I have been gone with the Silmaril for two hours. At that time you may freely act. Do you detect any flaws in this plan from my perspective?"

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"The Silmaril will glow even with that much wrapping if you wait until it's dark. You should leave during the day. I think it'll still be day in two hours. I haven't been outside, I'm not sure. The House of Fëanor will try to kill you for stealing their Silmaril. I don't know if that's a flaw in the plan from your perspective."

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Nod. Sigh. "I won't insult you by thanking you. Plan stands without revision. If you have to explain what we were talking about, pretend we were discussing something intensely private to me and also my need for food." She opens the door, looks shaken and grateful, and says, "- thank you for seeing me, Lady Elwing."

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"My pleasure," says Elwing.

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And Promise goes out and makes sure she knows where the yard is and makes herself innocuous for an hour and then goes to check the yard again.

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And it's there; clothes, wrapped in fishing net.

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Scoop.

Fly fly fly why is this so fucking heavy why didn't they mention it GLOWS fly fly fly.
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Nothing shoots at her.

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Great. Then she can lug the damn thing all the way back to the fortress.

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A cry goes up as she returns, and he waits for her on the ramparts.

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She goes and plunks it down. "You didn't tell me it glowed. You didn't tell me that it plus enough stuff to make it not visibly glow weighs half as much as I do!"

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"..how much do you weigh?" He unravels it, opens the box, touches it, immediately removes his hand. Goes very very still.

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"Thirty pounds."

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He shakes his head wearily. "An Elf your size would weigh a hundred. I apologize for not considering that flying creatures would have to be very light. Are you all right? Are you hungry?" He still isn't looking at her.
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"I'm hungry. I'm otherwise fine. They sang me almost all healed, I didn't know there was mortal magic. Is something wrong with it? Did they have a decoy or something?"

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"No. It's the real thing. You prevented a war. Someone bring me food for Promise. We are, again, not mortals, but have magic. My family no longer has any healing magic, because we've been fighting for so long."

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"What does fighting have to do anything?"

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"It makes healing magic stop working, among the Eldar. My brother has very powerful magic but he can't use it for healing anymore."

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"Oh. Sorcery doesn't have anything like that. No matter what I did I'd still be able to heal. As long as I remembered, anyway, I might be stuck here long enough to forget all the sorcery I know."

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"You're welcome to write it down." He is flexing the fingers of his remaining hand; the fingertips are burned. Behind them, the Silmaril is bathing the whole castle in astonishing, beautiful, sparkling light.

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"You didn't tell me it was dangerous to touch, either, what if she hadn't had a box for it?"
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"It would not be dangerous for you to touch, or for her. It burns evil things."

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He wraps it up carefully and takes it inside. "Do you want to eat now?"

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"Yes."

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So he feeds her, with burned fingers. The Silmaril sits in the corner of the room. He cannot take his eyes off it.


"Anything you want to talk about?"
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"What else are you going to do with me?"

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"I am trying to think whether there's any hope of defeating the Enemy with you. If there's none, I will let you go."

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"I just made an enemy and probably more by now via rumor in a place that its inhabitants like to call the only safe place on the continent. If I don't want to curl up and starve until I can barely move I have to have either a master or a vassal, I am desperately averse to use of a vassal for anything I can't avoid using one for however many names I know now and I don't, I'm not good at, outside dire circumstances I'd have to trust somebody to volunteer to -"

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"By let you go I mean rescind all orders, I'd still feed you if you want me to. Or order one of my people to do it."

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"Oh."

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"The problem is that I am not comfortable with the fact that fairy vassalhood exists and I am not willing to exist in a world where it does and I can't protect myself. If you find someone else in this fortress who you like and trust you can form an arrangement with them and then I can release you."

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"Okay."

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"We have to do something about the Enemy first, though, if we can."

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"You still haven't told me his name, I can't tell you if his name works if I don't have it."

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"Melkor."

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"He either isn't the right kind of thing or that's not his real name."

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"It's an Eldarin simplification, but you got mine just from reading my father's. Manwë? Ulmo? Uinen? Mairon?"

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"First two yes, not the others."

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"Okay. We could command them to attack the Enemy. Do you have to be speaking face-to-face with them?"

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"They have to be able to hear me."

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"I want to give you leave to go fly around and talk to orcs and understand why this is worth it, but I'm worried you'll get taken prisoner by the Enemy. I can ask people to bring some orcs back here for you to talk to."

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"What's an orc?"

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"The foot soldiers of the Enemy."

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"What's talking to one supposed to get me?"

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"I would like you to agree with me that using you to destroy the Enemy is worth it. I will do it anyway, because it is worth it, but I think you'll be happier and more productive and we'll be likelier to succeed if you agree with me. And right now the only thing you know about the Enemy is that he tortured me and you'd be warranted in thinking I probably deserved it."

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"Well," she says magnanimously, "I don't know what you were like before that."

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"If I'd found you before that I'd have immediately promised never to give you any orders and we'd probably have been good friends until we both got killed because that is what happens to naive people in Beleriand if they are lucky."

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"I'm immortal. Like, really immortal," she reminds him. "And if you were going to be handing out promises not to give me any orders that would probably have bumped you up in trustworthiness to make you a good contingency master so I'd have wanted it a little narrower; rescindments are orders."

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"Noted. But you did not meet me five hundred years ago when I remembered more than scattered chunks of my life and the Enemy could not talk in my head at will and I was not in constant pain and I had people I loved; you met me now. And now if I can I will use you to end him, and then I will find you someone you can trust and have such a good mutual agreement with, and then I will figure out how to stop existing, which has been the only thing I've wanted for a very long time."

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"I don't expect it to make sense to you."

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"If there's a gate before you do that I could fix your hand and whatever else is hurting you."
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"Most of the things that are hurting me are not the kind healing spells fix. But that is very kind of you."

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"I will ensure that you are not negatively affected by any of this."

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"...How?"

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"...by making sure you have a person here to your liking who can feed you, and a gate back if the means for any such thing exists, and rescinding all my orders. And I can leave, if you like, or pretend if you like that I'm off on a grand adventure to discover myself, so you don't feel any sense of responsibility..."

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"I'm not very likely to believe you're on a grand adventure to discover yourself."

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"At need I am a pretty good liar."

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"I don't like being lied to."

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"In that case I won't lie to you. You cannot sincerely think that it's somehow good or important for me to be alive?"

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"I wouldn't try to stop you from killing yourself if that was what you wanted to do but I'm skeptical you can avoid it negatively affecting me. I wouldn't kill Thorn if he were mortal and I had the flexibility - I'd have him turned him into a sparrow, even, not a snail, I'd leave him his consort, I think she actually loves him -"

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"I would much much rather die than be turned into a sparrow, and everyone who loves me is dead."

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"Well, I'm pretty sure Thorn would rather be a sparrow. Like I said, I wouldn't stop you."

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"Probably. Things have to get pretty bad for most people to decide that even the things which cast a shadow like their memories are unbearable, that life could never ever get good enough to be worth it. I doubt anything that bad has happened to Thorn."

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"Fifty years of torture wasn't even itself bad enough to meet that bar, it was all the years since. Am I upsetting you? I can stop talking."

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"I don't want to end up like you. It would be really inconvenient because I'm actually immortal. - I think that's about how long he had me."
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"I do not think you are likely to end up like me. There were a lot of intervening factors very specific to my situation. For example, you're at this point entirely sure that you're not with him, right? One of the Enemy's favorite tricks was to make us repeatedly experience being rescued and then trying to make it in the outside world, only to wake up with him again. So we couldn't be sure. I might still be in Angband. I have no idea how I'd ever tell. I do not think that applies in your case."

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"No, it doesn't. Mental sorcery you have to know the person really well and you can't get to that point if they're under any substantial orders."

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"There you go. Can't mess with your memories for the same reason?

Also, if you have any loved ones, they won't all die in front of you because of your mistakes, because they will be fairies and undying, yes?"
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"That would also be mental sorcery. I don't have any loved ones and never have, but mortals sometimes wind up in Fairyland same ways fairies can end up in the mortal world. Or here, wherever here is. So if I had them they wouldn't necessarily be immortal and if they were that would just mean one of the many things that can happen to people wouldn't be something that could happen to them."

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"Okay. I did not mean to scare you about your own wellbeing. Recovering from terrible things is very possible and I am very sure you'll be able to do it. Do you think having a few years here to rest and think and not worry about the war would be good for you? We can do that."

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"Are there any more obviously preventable massacres waiting to happen during those years?"

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"No. I can't predict when or if the Enemy will move against Sirion, but otherwise there are no places to massacre, and if the people of Sirion come here we will run rather than fighting them."

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"Then yeah, I guess."
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"Okay. I'll visit you twice a day with food - is twice a day the right frequency? - and otherwise not bother you, and no one else will."

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"I think twice a day is about right, I barely remember getting to set my own mealtimes."

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"You can tell me if you want to change it."

He wraps his hand in fabric, puts the Silmaril back in the box. Leaves.
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She goes and pokes it.
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She feels energized, like she hasn't been flying all day with a heavy load. Her knee stops hurting.

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...okay. She wouldn't have taken a rock's word for it if it burned her but it would have given her something to draw about.

She draws about other things instead. And then she sleeps.
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When she wakes up it is gone; someone must have come and taken it. A few hours later Maedhros comes in, offers her food, stares at the wall.

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Nom. "What is the Silmaril besides a judgmental shiny rock?"

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"It is as far as I know rather generous in its assessments of people," he says. "It contains the divine light of creation that once sustained our homeland. Our people become, over the long Ages, less physically embodied in the world, less able to act on it. The Silmarils combat that. They prevent decay. They provide healing. They strengthen and revitalize."

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"You could have told me they healed in case I hadn't gotten away without being shot at. How does it assess people at all?"

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"Healing on a much slower scale; I don't think it'd do anything about being shot. It was blessed by one of the Valar to burn any evil being that touched it. I assume it uses her judgement for that."

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"But how? What does it look at?"

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"I don't know. I suppose I could ask a lot of people to touch it and give us some more information to reason from."

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"I poked it to see what happened and I guess it liked me but in retrospect I wish I knew what it liked and whether it was looking at it before I touched it."

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"You seem very obviously not evil. The only people I have known it to burn have all been mass murderers."

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"There wasn't anybody to kill but he made me do things."

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"I am also very sure it wouldn't count things someone was forced to do."

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"Oath doesn't count?"

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"I took the Oath voluntarily. If someone decided to be a vassal of Thorn, and gave him their name because they wanted to work for him - maybe he offered them something - then they would be responsible for things he ordered them to do, even if they regretted working for him, because they made the initial choice."

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"I don't actually know if he has anybody like that. Blossom maybe, I don't know."

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"But not you. Being forced to hurt people is very awful but it does not make you evil."

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"...I know that, I'm not fishing for reassurance."

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"I am not at all clear on what you want from me, other than 'someone else', which is a reasonable thing I would want in your place."

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"I'm curious about the Silmaril and what it was reading. You remember me freaking out about mindreading. I can ask someone else if someone knows more things."

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"No one else here would know anything more than that. I vividly remember you freaking out about mindreading. I don't think it works that way - after all, it would still burn someone who believed themselves wholly good - but I can't say."

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"Well. At least my knee's better."

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"I am glad. Were you injured falling?"

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"No, I just spent a lot of time injured and was only allowed to heal myself when told. I wasn't unable to fly so I made the flight unhealed."

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He nods. "And you can't heal yourself in our world?"

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"Sorcery doesn't work here. Tried it once I figured out this wasn't the regular mortal world, but nothing."

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"That's too bad. Our magic works here. I wonder if it wouldn't work in fairyland."

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"No idea."

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"If my family weren't dead, I had a brother who could invent you a magic item that made you deaf whenever you heard an order you hadn't expected, things like that."

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"Oh, that would have been nice..."

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"The minute I heard your world existed I'd have rushed to his workshop and pleaded for one, and he'd have grumbled and then heard the story and stopped grumbling and had it done in absurdly little time."

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"How would it distinguish an order from an unenforced imperative?"

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"I don't understand how our engineering works very well. It might block both, honestly, or if there's a way to filter them he'd discover that, or he'd just have us sit there doing trials for a week to train a piece of metal to recognize the different innately. If you were willing to participate, that is."

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"I would want one of those things very badly. You can train metal?"

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"I knew people who could. I can't personally."

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"In general it's doable."

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"It is. Some of my father's books you were reading explain the principles, though it uses our telepathy so I don't know if you could learn. The Dwarven style doesn't use telepathy. You could try that."

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"Are there any books on the Dwarven style around?"

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"The Dwarven kingdom was destroyed a few years back. I don't think enough survived to reconstruct their magic tradition, but I can look through what we have."

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"I'd feel better having some magic even if it can't be sorcery."

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"Maglor can also teach you music, if you enjoy that. It's easier and can't do persistent things like order-screening but can do all sorts of useful effects. And, come to think of it, I'm sure he still remembers healing songs even though they no longer work for him so maybe he could even teach you those."

Maglor clicks.
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"Got his name now. First syllable matches. Um, I've never been especially musical but I don't know that I have any innate lack of talent, I'd try."
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"His birth name is Canafinwë Macalaurë, you could have had it just by wondering if he shared it with our father. Macalaurë means 'shapes gold'. But we have separate words for 'gold' the metal and 'gold' the color or the light, and 'laurë' is the latter, so it's closer to 'weaves golden light' than 'makes thing out of gold'. The Eldar love names. It makes me sad we can't tell you all about them."

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"Half of what you just said didn't make sense to me because mortal languages are fundamentally bizarre."

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"Oh? How so?"

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"It's like, you're always talking in code for some reason. I just talk."

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"We also thought that, until we met other people who just talked and whose words were not intelligible to us. So then we learned theirs."

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"Yeah, I know there are multiple mortal languages," she says. "I'm not speaking any of them."

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"I had noticed that. It has its uses but if you can't turn it off and hear the difference that's rather a shame."

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"I can't turn it off. I can tell what sounds you're using, if I pay close attention, it just doesn't feel natural to do that. How did you notice? I thought it was supposed to be pretty unobtrusive to mortals."

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"It probably is unobtrusive to mortals," he says. "You have an accent and cadence associated with early northern Beleriand Thindarin, with some sound changes specific to my family, and there's no way you would speak that way. It's more like how I'd expect it to come through if you were speaking osanwë. No one's words sound like their thoughts but yours did."

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"Huh."

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"I thought it was somehow matching what I spoke. Is that what it does?"

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"I don't actually know what you hear. Various books say mortals will hear their native language, or whatever language they expect to hear - I guess the latter would normally match whatever you speak, but you seem to have been surprised."

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"Perhaps it has to default somehow if someone strongly expects not to share a common language at all, or that if we share one it'd be the one that's not spoken on this continent."

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"Maybe. What would you expect me to have spoken?"

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"Nandorin, possibly, we border their territory, or you'd be from even further off and speak something else - if I bring a ship ashore in a strange city I don't have much expectations about what they'll speak but I do expect I won't already know it."

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"I don't think I've ever heard of a fairy talking to someone who couldn't understand them. Unless they were deaf, and then writing's the same. We can do it with signing too it's just - uncomfortable."

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"So clearly it doesn't run entirely off expectations. 'what you understand best' is a good guess. Sadly I think everyone in this fortress would have the same history there as me, so I don't see how we could check."

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"Didn't occur to me to ask in Sirion, probably wouldn't have if it had. No one seemed confused when I talked there."

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"The peoples of Sirion must speak six or seven languages, and have weaker expectations about that sort of thing.

I am curious how it was there but would understand if you don't want to tell me about it."
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"They were suspicious of me until I swore I didn't work for the Enemy and then they were very kind. Elwing thinks you're going to chase me down for taking your Silmaril and I didn't correct her. - I started a sewing project while I was making sure I had a loose idea of how they functioned as a community and didn't bring it back. Apparently you can't just sew leaves here but I can work in fabric."

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He nods. She is done eating. "Anything else? I will come back tonight."

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Headshake.

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He leaves.

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She goes for a little wander around the fortress; she's allowed.
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There are a lot of people in the fortress. All of them look at her, but blankly, not with particular curiosity, and no one attempts to talk with her. The fortress is neat and elegantly laid out and not particularly pleasant. There's a courtyard with a garden.

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Ooh, a garden. She goes and gets the book she was reading and takes it out to the garden and sits there and reads it. It is a little more frustrating to read the book knowing that it requires being telepathic to do the magic but it's still interesting.

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No one disturbs her. Eventually it starts to get dark.

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She goes back to her room when it's dark. No fairylights.

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And shortly after that he comes in and offers her food without looking at her. "Maglor says he will teach you how music magic works if you are interested."

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"I am. Is plain speaking likely to interfere or do exact lyrics not matter...? I guess I could learn to produce specific mortal sounds for longer stretches than names if it's important."

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"...good question. I am not at all sure. You can ask him."

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"Okay. Why do you stare at the wall so much?"

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"I feel uncomfortable looking at you while doing this."

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"Why?"
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"It is intimate and we are not intimates. Do fairies have a concept of -"

He sighs. He does not finish the sentence.
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"If that was going to be a personal question I am still allowed to evade those."

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"You said Thorn had a consort, what does that entail?"

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"She's the next highest ranking court member and considered trustworthy even under her orders, nobody but Thorn's allowed to touch her, Thorn touches her a lot. If you're asking if fairies have sex the answer is yes, it's just almost always at least vaguely horrible because of the background mastery thing."

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"Among my people what we are doing right now would be considered sexual. That is, obviously, vaguely horrible and so I try ignoring you entirely."

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"Ah."

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"I am not -" his face twitches - "that particular kind of monster. I don't know how to avoid this situation, though."

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"You're not being creepy about it," she says. "It's just a matter of how I work and the fact that there's no way to get fairy food."

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"I had noted that it didn't seem to cause you particular discomfort, more than me being around to perhaps decide to order you in general."

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"I'm very practical."

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"I had noted that as well. I think I am reasonably practical as well but my practical solution in this case is to not look at you. Does it bother you?"

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"I was curious, not offended."

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"Among mortals, when we had mortal neighbors, they had all kinds of rules about things to avoid lest you create the appearance of impropriety. The Eldar don't worry about that but don't do things like this either. And - if someone had sworn an Oath to obey another person for some unimaginable reason people'd probably make sure they weren't alone together."

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"Vassalization is sort of the default social relationship among fairies," Promise sighs. "Nothing else is sustainable when the possibility's hanging over everybody's heads."

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"Fairies are horrifying."

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"We're not all the same."

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"I'm sure there are lots of nice ones. The way you function is horrifying."

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"I know."

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"If everyone weren't dead they'd be thinking how to fix it forever. But I can't think how Maglor and I could do it alone, not when the knowledge fairies exist has me mostly paralyzed with terror."

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"I don't know how you could fix it but you could curb the worst of the abuse if you got the Queen. I used to think about that a lot."

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"How would that do it?"

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"The Queen knows all the other fairies' names. - every kind of fairy has a kind magic, and by and large one-of-a-kinds have the strongest, and she's one of those." Food's gone.

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He stands. "It's a shame you don't have osanwë - if you had everyone's name and our range you could just fly through fairyland broadcasting 'your orders are revoked, no giving orders ever again'. See you tomorrow."

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"See you."

And she goes to bed.
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And in the morning he has food. He does not look as if he's slept since they first met.

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"Don't you sleep?" she asks. "There are fairy kinds who don't have to, or who don't have to much, but they look. Awake."
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"I don't sleep and do have to," he says, "it's inconvenient. Are you one of the kinds that requires sleep?"

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"Yeah, leaflets do."

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"In theory with the Silmaril I should not need to very often. Once a week, perhaps. I do not know what will happen if I persist in not sleeping."

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"Why are you not sleeping?"

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"The Enemy talks in my head when I do. I don't know if it's him or if I am insane, but if it is him, he shouldn't know about you."

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"And he can read your mind like you can 'only more so'. So I guess it wouldn't even help if you had me order you not to tell him."

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"Can orders make you do things you aren't capable of doing?"

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"Depends what you mean 'capable of doing'. Physically capable no, you couldn't make me fly twice as fast as my top speed or something. Psychologically capable yes."

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"In that case it might be worth a try. Could I order you to think privately if you didn't know how, even though it was in principle possible? Could I order you to stop speaking privately - I won't, I'm just trying to get a sense of specifically how these two magics interact..."

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"You couldn't get me to do something I didn't know how to do like that. I'm not sure you could get me to stop thinking privately altogether - you could load me up with other things to think about in case that one slipped - but you could order me to think publicly for sure."

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"What's the difference?"

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"I think privately by thinking about being in my tree; nobody can go in my tree if I don't let them. You cannot forbid me to think about that except indirectly you can try to crowd it out with something else. But you can order me to also think about not being in my tree and get my thoughts that way. It'd amount to the same thing; I can't actually keep a secret you really want to have."

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"I'm not going to order you to think about not being in your tree. I don't torture people. I used to draw the line at 'I don't mind control people', but.

If there was a way to make fairy orders not work in this world at all I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd do anything I could to see it realized."
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"Might interfere with your oath if you lost the Silmaril somehow."

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'Right now I have the Silmaril. I am not constrained to not destroy any capabilities that I'd need if it were taken again, or I couldn't kill myself even once I've found a way, right? Come to think of it, I think I can even order you to order me not to demand your help retrieving it again if it's stolen again, right now it's mine, the Oath has nothing to say..."

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"Does giving you a specific order to give me one give you any other avenues to control me?"

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"Not if you phrase it well."

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"How would this best be phrased to accomplish my goals?"

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"You probably want something like 'order me the following: never give me orders intended to forcibly secure my help retrieving the Silmaril'."

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"This Silmaril," he says. "If I do that, does it give you space to give me other orders?"

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"No, your previous order will kick back in after I've completed this one as an exception. Recency takes precedence where there's conflict but it doesn't overwrite old orders. There are more of them?"

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"The other ones are in Enemy hands, so with respect to them my Oath just binds me to fight him, which I would certainly do anyway. Once they're retrieved I can make you the same promise with respect to them.

The Oath doesn't oblige me to attack the Enemy right now because there'd be no hope at all of success, you can't be bound to make attempts guaranteed not to work. If I saw an avenue to successfully attack the Enemy I'd be bound to it, but I'd also want to do it because he needs to be stopped."
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"Oh. Doesn't that mean he can make you attack anyone who doesn't like you enough to let you have a Silmaril if he just gives them one?"

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"We think that's what happened with this one. Most people, even people who really don't like me, would have the good sense to offer the Silmaril in exchange for my surrender or something like that and then take out their dislike on me once the oath is out of the way."

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"How do you retain possession of a Silmaril after you surrender?"

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"I am not sure. Perhaps they'd permit me to jump with it into a live volcano, or something in that vein. Perhaps they'd take it away once I surrendered, and then I'd be in horrible agony but no one else would have been hurt. Even if I knew they'd take it away when I surrendered, while it was in my hands I'd have fully free choice, I could decide to surrender even anticipating that."

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"Oh."

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"The Eldar are not quite as horrifying badly designed as fairies but there are still some major drawbacks to the 'cannot swear falsely' thing." Is she done eating by now?

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Yep. "I think our design causes extremely bad incentives but it never wedges us in a way that's in principle insoluble."

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He stands up. "This is soluble. The costs are unacceptable but it's not that there's no course of action permitted to me. Anyone will be able to help you find Maglor if you so desire."

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"I - I wandered around yesterday and I don't have the impression anybody wants to talk to me."

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"I ordered them not to bother you. Not fairy-ordered, just command-in-an-army ordered. I can tell people you'd appreciate company, if you would, and they'll certainly answer questions you ask them."

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"Oh. I wouldn't mind talking to people as long as it's not too many at once."

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"I doubt that will be a problem."

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"Okay."

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He leaves.

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And she goes looking for someone to find her Maglor.

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He must have conveyed his instructions at once, because while people are still awkward around her they pointedly try to smile and do not turn away.

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...that's not actually that much better, but, okay, hi, random person, she's looking for Maglor?

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Yes, definitely, random person can take her to Maglor.

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"Thank you."

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Maglor is downstairs in a spacious hall she hadn't seen. He does not look surprised to see them coming. Or perturbed. He raises an eyebrow as if there is some humor in the situation which no one else can see. "Promise."

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"Um, hi. Maedhros said you'd teach me about magical music."

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"I will. Would you like to see a demonstration or have the principles explained first?"

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"...Demonstration."

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And he starts singing. It is a song about a bright place far away, and as he sings it the room brightens; it is a song about children, and as he sings she can see them in the center of the room, clinging to each other, bright-eyed, disheveled, giggling; a rainstorm comes and wild howls up around her, real wind, nearly blowing her away, and the children laugh and dance in the rain,which splashes everywhere - she can feel it on her face - though when he stops singing the hall is dry.

"That is a demonstration. Most of my music is for war."
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"Wow."
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"The simplest magic song I know makes lights dance in the air. Do you want to try to learn it?"

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"Yeah."

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So he sings it. Lights do, indeed, dance in the air. "You try."

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"Um, I might need to hear it a few times to memorize both the sounds you're making the words out of - if those matter? - and the pitches."

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"Both of those definitely matter." He sings it again. Again. Again. "I can break it down into pieces for you?"

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"Yeah."

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So he sings a line. "Can you repeat that bit?"

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She repeats it. Her voice is not exceptional, but she can match pitches, and having paid sufficient attention to the exact phonemes she can reproduce them exactly.

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He nods. "Do that one three times, then the next one three times, and we'll build until you can do the whole thing?"

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"Okay." So she repeats that one.

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And he teaches her the next one.

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And so on and so on. "Is it one pitch at a time for magical reasons?"

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"We can only produce one pitch at a time with our voices. I can produce several if I'm using instruments, but I can't use instruments in combat very effectively."

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"Oh. I never actually heard a mortal sing before. I guess it makes sense with how you talk too."

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"Can you sing several notes at once?"

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She sings a chord.

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"Useful. In that case let me have someone fetch me a harp and I can teach you magic songs that are multiple sounds at a time."

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"Okay. It's probably easier to teach me musical notation than to have me learn everything by ear in the long run once we confirm I can do magic songs at all, though."

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"Yes, definitely. Would you like me to teach you that while we wait for a harp?"

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"First order of business is to see if I can make the lights song work."

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"There are only a few more verses."

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"Okay."

She learns them. She sings them.
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She can make dancing lights. Maglor's face has more faint humor in it than approval, but he congratulates her.

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"Thanks. Okay, what's your musical notation like?"

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So he explains it. He clearly warms up to the task halfway through, and by midday is wholly engrossed in it, sharing memory tricks and humming or playing examples.

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Ooh, memory tricks. She sings assorted chords as she learns to read them. It's a little hard for her to sing different phonemes at the same time, compared to pitches, but it turns out she can do that too.

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In that case he can pull out magic songs that require a choir, though most of those aren't combat oriented because back when it was worth doing that kind of thing there wasn't a war on. He has dozens of songs she could learn if she's interested, with all kinds of effects.

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Gosh, what a selection.

- She wants to be able to heal. She feels nervous about not being able to do that. It was the first substantial sorcery she picked up.
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"No one here can do that, and I don't think I have it written down, but I can teach you one which doesn't work for me anymore from memory if that's any help."

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"Assuming the magic is in the notes and not in being taught the song by someone who can use it as a spell, yes please."

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So he tries teaching it the same way he taught her dancing lights.

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(She scribbles down notes about it, not full notation but enough to jog her memory.)

And when she has it down she sings it through.
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The burns on Maglor's fingers are already healing quickly, but now they're nearly gone, just leaving raw pink skin. "Huh," he says. "Thank you."

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"You're welcome!" It's not as good as sorcerous healing for how long it takes or how well it does but it seems impolite to disparage his magic system when he's so generously teaching her.

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"We never got really good at healing because we didn't need it before the war and during the war, well. I can teach you about the principles of composition that would let you design your own magic songs but that will take us decades."

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"I don't really have anything else to do."

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He nods. "Then we'll start on it tomorrow. It is actually getting rather late."

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Nod.

She goes back to her room to wait to be fed.
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He comes in a little while later. He feeds her. He stares blankly into space.

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"Do you want me to sing your hand better?"
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"Our healing magic doesn't regrow limbs. Everything that our magic could do for me was done for me when I was rescued from Angband. But thank you."

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"I mean the burns on the hand you still have."

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"Ah. Those injuries I feel like I rather deserve."

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"That's weird."
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"Is it? How so?"

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"Just conceptually. Why do you think you deserve it?"

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"The Silmarils burn the hands of evil things. I did an evil act, retrieved the Silmaril, and was burned by it. Perhaps it is good to have a reminder of what I have done."

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"You kind of seem like you don't actually need a reminder. Maybe I'm reading you wrong."

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"It also keeps me from falling asleep."

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"Did you want to try the protective order or is the mindreading not the sort of thing you can in principle fend off?"

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"Mindreading shouldn't work at this range anyway. I may in fact just be insane. But if he were within range it would not be possible to fend off even in principle, or at least if it can I don't know how. We can do the protective order for no future quests for this Silmaril, though."

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"Okay."

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"If you would like, you can order me the following: never give me orders intended to forcibly secure my help retrieving the Silmaril."

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"Never give me orders intended to forcibly secure my help retrieving the Silmaril."

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He flinches. He has gone quite rigid. It takes him a long moment to feed her anything else.

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"Are you okay?"

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He ignores that.

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She eats.
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When she is done eating he stands to leave.

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She doesn't stop him.

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And then she is left alone.

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She practices the lights song and the healing song each once, quietly, to help herself remember them, and then she goes to sleep.

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In the morning he comes in to feed her.

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Nom. "What were you twitching about last night?"

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"I find being under mind control - even of my own design, to achieve a good I could not have achieved without it - to be a form of intense psychological torment. The way you feel about having your mind read, I suppose."

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"Oh."
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"Does - the order I gave, regarding should some fairy control me - make more sense if you compare it to having your mind read constantly for the rest of your life?"

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"Yes."

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"Maglor said he enjoyed singing with you, and that you are a quick study, and it's a real shame how much of our written music was lost when our kingdoms fell."
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"How much of his time is available for singing lessons...?"

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"All of it, probably. I told everyone not to bring orcs back, you wanted some time for recuperation."

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"Okay."

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"I should have suggested you learn songs sooner. It is a very good idea."

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"They're nice. It's a pity mortals can't sing chords but Maglor has an amazing voice anyway."

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"Doesn't he? And instruments make it rather easy to overcome that particular limitation, save in war. I expect now he's thinking about how to write combat songs that can have more than one note."

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"I know you don't have much reason to trust me, but trust me, once you get independent verification of anything about the Enemy you are going to want him stopped."

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"And then I won't be able to heal anymore."
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"It took Maglor nearly three hundred years to start having trouble with it. You might be fine. And eventually you're going to gate back to your world and have your sorcery."

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"If anybody knows this world's here to gate to."

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He shudders. "Healing can also come back. If you spend time not fighting."

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"Okay."

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"I would like to know what you are currently thinking about our Enemy and the war against him but I am not going to oblige you to tell me."

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"Well, nobody in Sirion seemed to like him either but I don't know very much."

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"Do you have questions?"

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"I don't think I know enough to have questions."

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"All right." Back to staring at the wall.

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"You could start at the beginning."

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"In the beginning someone named Eru created this world. He had created already the Ainur, powers that acted according to his design, and he set them the task of building the world he had envisioned and given them space for. Morgoth was one of those powers, and his task was destruction; when others built continents he upended them, making mountains, and when they had thriving forests he drowned them in fire and under the earth, making coal, and while he hated the other Ainur and desired the destruction of the world, his doings helped to forge it.

Eventually the other Ainur tired of contesting with him over land and left the world to him, and build their own continent where he was unwelcome and they could design things as they preferred it. This continent was Valinor; it is west of here. The rest of the world was for the Enemy, and he delighted in it and sunk his power into the land and built a great stronghold.

And then we were put in the world. We awakened by the lake Cuivienen, far east of here. We learned to speak and delighted in language, we explored and delighted in the world, we made ourselves at home in the trees.

And Morgoth was intrigued, and jealous, and when some of our people wandered in innocence too far from the others he captured them and took them to his stronghold. And he tortured them and forced them to breed and tortured their children and did this for many generations, until he had foot soldiers made in mockery of us and bound by his magic to serve him.

And then he escalated, taking more and more Elves, until we were afraid and ventured barely at all from the lake shore, and starved, and lived in terror. And eventually one of the other Valar rode by, and learned of us, and we were frightened of him and he learned why we were so frightened, and he told the other Valar and they decided to war with Morgoth."
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- should she mention that -

- no. Maybe not.

"I didn't know children worked that way."
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"The Valar have powerful magic.

So the Valar warred with Morgoth, and much of the world was destroyed in their fighting. The Valar won and took Morgoth prisoner. Morgoth had already bred and created and released many horrible creatures into the world, so then the Valar came to us and invited us to their paradise where we could be safe. Most of us went.

And after three Ages of the world, Morgoth was pardoned, and he promised he'd never do such awful things again, and he came to live among us in Valinor. And he spread lies and tried to provoke a civil war and then assassinated the King, destroyed Valinor, and fled.

The King was my grandfather, and my father succeeded him. My father was worried that Morgoth, back here on this continent, would return to torturing and enslaving and breeding orcs, so he prepared us to go off to war with him. The Valar were angry and tried to deter us from departing, and then there was a battle, but we reached these shores. We tried to stop him. We held on for a very long time, and lots of people lived in safety they would not otherwise have known. But in the end we lost, and so now he is back to freely torturing and enslaving and slaughtering, and someday he'll decide I am not amusing enough to permit to wander around free and I suppose he'll come after us."
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"And you don't know his real name."

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"Melkor is the name he was known to us by."

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"I wonder why some of them have bits of their real names in the ones you know and some of them don't."

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"Manwë and Ulmo are both derived from their real names. Manwë is the King of the Valar. I am mildly tempted to send you off to Valinor so you can ask for an audience with him and tell him to fight Melkor, but there are far too many ways that could fail."

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"I suspect so, yes."

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"A few hundred years ago there were enough forces on this continent alone to take him down, and our only problem is that we were disunited. But if I'd had you then I wouldn't have been ruthless enough to actually do it."

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"Is there anyone who knows the Enemy's real name?"
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"Manwë and Ulmo both would. I am honestly thinking that the best plan is to somehow get Ulmo's attention and ask for the name, but in general drawing the attention of the Valar is dangerous."

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"What do they do?"

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"Last time we talked they doomed us to never fulfill our Oath, wandering the continent in desperation until we died or wished we had, and then spending a long time bodiless and desperate to return to life."

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"They can do that?"
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He gestures around. "Worked out pretty well, didn't it? Except for the 'desperate to return to life', I really doubt I'll be that."

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"How does 'dooming' people work, though...?"

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"We don't know. You can ask Ulmo to tell you once you have his attention, I guess."

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Sigh.

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"Thoughts?"

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"Ordering hostile vassals with powers one doesn't understand is complicated and it sounds like Valar have a lot of powers I don't understand."

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"Yes. And that I don't understand. I think it's nonetheless worth attempting, eventually, because otherwise he just kills everyone on the continent."

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"Mm."

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"You disagree?"

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"Well, I agree that everyone on the continent dying is bad, but commanding ridiculously powerful supernatural entities could also do really bad things and I don't know the scope of those things. Isn't there anyone besides Ulmo who'd know more?"

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"It's not just the dying, orcs are bound to serve Melkor and you could help all of them. I don't know who'd know more. Huan's dead. Melian's dead. Everyone is dead."

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"We have probably at least a few decades to think about it. I was going to let you heal insofar as you can before we even think about it."

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"Okay."

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Is she done eating by now? He's getting tense again.

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Yep.

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He leaves.

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She goes to her music teacher.

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Who has dug up lots of old symphonies and is happy to work through whatever she's interested in.

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Cool.

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They spend the day on magic songs. He also shows her some of the ones where the shape of the magic is determined by the singer. By the end of the day, she can do visual illusions, though not as gripping or detailed as his.

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She couldn't do that with sorcery! She'd have to cheat with a bunch of fairylights. This is cool.

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He seems delighted to have a student with a fairy voice, if nothing else, and doesn't even notice when it's gotten dark.

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She does. "Good night," she says, and she goes back to her room to have dinner.

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He brings dinner. "Do you not require protein or anything?"

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"...Huh?"

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"Food. Does it need to have specific nutritional content for you, or is that like the idea that meaning attaches to sounds when people speak?"

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"...There's foods with medicinal properties? I'd get bored if I ate nothing but one thing, maybe unless it was haws from my tree? What's protein?"

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"...do you know any chemistry or physics?"

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"Not really? Just commonsense stuff I picked up from learning transmutation, and, like, 'if you drop things they fall'."

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"We can't do transmutation, so I don't know what you'd consider common sense."

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"Metals are more like each other than they are like other things, so it's easy to transmute a metal into another metal, that sort of thing. Mercury's harder because it's liquid."

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"Oh. All right. In this world there are about eighty fundamental kinds of things. Metals are many of them. We call them fundamental because you can isolate a single tiny essence of them - the smallest aluminum, the smallest gold, the smallest oxygen - and then so far we can't break those tiny essences, and we think that if we did we wouldn't get an even smaller aluminum, we'd get something else entirely.

Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.

Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?
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"Sort of, I guess."

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"Essences can be rearranged from one stable form to another one. There are rules about which they'll prefer if there are two stable forms possible for a given bunch of them. When I eat food, my body takes the essences and rearranges them to move my muscles and breathe and things like that. Down to the smallest level this is under my conscious control if I desire; I can tell a muscle to stop doing it, though then I might hurt myself, or to do it faster or differently.

But I can only rearrange what I have in the first place, and I can only do rearrangements if I can create the conditions for them within my body. Therefore I have to eat things that give me all the essences I require, and if there are things I can't create the conditions for internally I have to eat something that already contains it.

This is clearly not how you work. I am confused about how you work instead. Even the Maiar, if they have biological bodies, construct them from essences."
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"Well, if I had to do that, then I could run out of essences and then I wouldn't be thoroughly immortal, so I guess that's not how I work, but I don't know much about what I'd do instead."

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"Yes, if we run out of essences our bodies can stop running and then we have to go ask the Valar for a new body. If your body can heal from anything it definitely does not work like ours. I'm glad you don't require more variety of food, anyway. It'll take some time before anything grows."

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"When I have sorcery I can make plants grow very fast. ...Which I guess also doesn't make sense with the essences thing."

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"In our world the formal definition of magic is things which create essences, allow essences to undergo unfavorable transformations that they usually wouldn't, or create energy. I had a brother who thought that it was inelegant for magic to be three different things like that, and concluded that all three of them are actually somehow the same thing."

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"Fairyland has a lot of things that behave in ways that sound like by that definition they'd be magic even though no one ensorceled them. Sourceless waterfalls and stuff."

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"Yes, we'd consider those to be magic."

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"Anyway, what's protein in particular and why would I need it?"

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"They're a particular category of essence-clump. They tend to have very complicated structures, but they're all built off the same building blocks. I can't create the internal conditions to produce them - I can create about half the building blocks, but there's no way I know to get the rest of the building blocks - so I have to eat them to keep this body going. If I didn't, I would lose muscle mass first, and then eventually I would be scraping what I have off other parts of my body so my heart didn't stop beating and my blood was still carrying oxygen and it'd be increasingly distracting to sustain my body and eventually it would give out.

If you were like us and ate nothing but leaves you'd have a hard time building any muscle. We mostly eat animals and animal products to get protein.

Come to think of it, you weigh far too little to be made out of the essences we are. I wonder if you're just made of something entirely different."
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"If I needed to eat animals I'd be in trouble, Fairyland doesn't have any."

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"...none? Do you have insects? Do you have flowers? What pollinates the plants?"

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"No insects either. Lots of flowers! Plants mostly pollinate themselves, although some kinds of fairies pollinate them to help them along."

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"Well. I'd take you out to see lots of cute animals but it's not safe, regrettably. It sounds like Fairyland's creator had a much more specific vision and less design by committee than the creators of our world."

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"I'm not sure anybody made Fairyland. I guess somebody might have."

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"It sounds very definitely like someone made it to me." He's almost relaxed.

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"Maybe. They didn't tell anybody they did it, though. And there's the regular mortal world, too."

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"Tell me about that one."

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"I've never been. And I only met a mortal for a little while like - fifty years ago, about. It's full of mortals, they come in different colors but only one kind really, and sorcery doesn't work there either, and they have weird politics and lots of languages and no magic and lots of animals but I don't think they have Valar."

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"A shame. There are kingdoms of Men on this world and if one of them were the mortal world you're familiar with we could try getting you home. Eventually. Once stopping fairies forever has been figured out."

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"They live in cities, really dense cities, the mortal - she kept going through nicknames, I can't remember which one she had last - was talking about buildings a hundred stories tall, and they can't fly so they had things that could roll very fast along the ground with mortals sitting in them..."

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"I know of nowhere by that description." He definitely sounds a little relieved.

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"Yeah, I don't think this is the same place or I'd be more optimistic about finding a gate in the next couple thousand years."

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"If my family were alive I'd be pretty optimistic they could learn how to make sorcery work in this world or something like that, definitely with a few thousand years to work on it. But they're all dead. I'm sorry."

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"How would they possibly do that? Nobody even knows why sorcery doesn't work outside Fairyland."

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"They were very good at doing impossible things."

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"Like what?"

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"Preserving the divine light of Valinor so we could live outside it. Making it possible to talk instantly with anyone anywhere in the world. Armor like mine, which -" he smiles bitterly - "is enchanted so thoroughly I am almost impossible to harm in battle. Besieging a god for four hundred fifty years. Inventing new chemistry and biology along the way so we could figure out why Men died so easily, inventing music and fortresses that let us stand against a hundred times our numbers..."

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"Why do they die so easily?"

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"Why does who die so easily?"

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"Men. Is that one of the kinds of mortal around here?"

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"Men are the mortals around here. We're immortal, just not physically indestructible. They die so easily because diseases can kill them really quickly and their first cities had no sanitation. Among other reasons."

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"You can die and therefore you are a mortal. If I had sorcery I could de-age somebody every fifty years but they could still die and they'd still be mortal."

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"Yes, because if they did die they'd be gone, that's it. Whereas we just are stuck without a body until we can get a new one, which you yourself said might be what happens if you were destroyed in a way you couldn't heal from. If I figure out how to actually properly stop existing then it'll be correct to say I'm mortal. The Eldar in general still wouldn't be."

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"I don't know what would happen if there wasn't enough of me left to heal but I definitely would remember if I heard of bodiless fairies being a thing."

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"What else might happen? You get a new body elsewhere? That's what happens for us if the Valar aren't annoyed with us. You - stop existing? In that case you're mortal and just really hard to kill."

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"I'm also quite sure I can't stop existing. New body elsewhere might be it." She smiles a little. "Maybe I'd wake up in my tree."

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"If you were more confident of that I'd be happy to do it for you."

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"You'd have to get someone else to do it. And I'm not confident at all, I just made that up. But I started with common knowledge and some of it is that I will never, ever die."

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He nods. "You having my name prevents me from harming you? What are the constraints on that? Imagine you were a prisoner of the Enemy, and I could only get you free by cutting off your hand..."

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"You still couldn't do it." ...She glances at his hand.

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"Inconvenient. If you were about to be crushed, and I could only get you out of the way by shoving you, painfully hard?"

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"Similar situation, yeah."

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"If there's a medical procedure that requires an incision?"

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"Same principle. It's all the same. There are maybe fuzzy areas - mental sorcery typically counts as harm but read-only telepathy might not if I were thinking outside my tree; you could maybe turn me into an animal if you were a sorcerer and I wanted to be an animal; but you can't hurt me."

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"That's a stupid place to draw a line. ...would I not be able to osanwë you, if I hadn't taught you how to defend yourself and you experienced it as harm?"

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"It's not about what's 'experienced as' harm. There are plenty of things whoever's got the upper hand in a mutual vassalization can still do to their vassal. I don't know what use of osanwë you have in mind but communication probably doesn't cross the line."

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He shudders. "And anyone, ever, who captures you, could ask you for my name."

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"Yeah. I'm not really sure why you let me have it."

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"I have no desire to hurt you and did not realize that I'd be proscribed from any form of protecting you that caused you even the mildest injury. And the Enemy could give it to you and I'd rather it happen on my terms than on terms like those."

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"I can hurt myself, so if you had to cut my hand off and there was some way for me to close the gap..."

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"You can attack my sword with your hand? Good to know. We're just going to avoid letting you fall into the hands of the Enemy, that's the easiest way to resolve that problem."

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"Sounds good. Or just send someone whose name I don't know."

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"I have told most of my people not to let you learn theirs. I am ...very much trying them, with this. They have done well with it."

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"It's easier if people have nicknames. Especially words that mean things so I don't pay attention to the sounds, in case there's a match."

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He nods. "I don't just mean specifically the names."

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"What do you mean?"

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"They choose freely, do you understand that? If I give an order they obey it because they trust me to order them rightly, or they share my goals, or they value their honor. If I give them an order that is very very wrong - if I am keeping a slave, say, and order them to keep their names from her - I would be disappointed in the people in this castle if they did not consider whether following that order was right, given what they knew.

And they decided it was, because they have known me for a very long time and do know our Enemy. But I am certain that there are a number of people who at least considered forcing you to eat something and then releasing you, because when I was younger it's the sort of thing I'd have done without hesitation."
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"I know you're not giving them fairy orders," Promise says.

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"And did you wonder why they hadn't intervened? It is because they want to see the Enemy dead more than they want to be able to live with themselves afterwards, and because they knew me once when I was a good person and still trust me on some level as if I still were."

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"I wasn't sure they had that much information about me, actually."

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"I have not forbidden you from speaking with them, or telling them how you work, so a plan based on concealing from them what you are and what I've done would be a rather half-baked one."

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"They might think I was lying."

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"Then they'd come ask me."

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"And you could tell them whatever you liked."

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"And what I liked to tell them was the truth. I like having people who will stop me if they think I've crossed the line, even if they've been through hell and back at my side and think far too highly of me and might not notice in time."

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"Where's the line?"

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"I don't know. Not everything that might stop the Enemy is on this side of it, but it makes a pretty big difference. You're welcome to try convincing people, if you like, that I should be stopped."

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Sigh. "I don't have anywhere else to go or anyone else to feed me and you're loads better than Thorn."

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"You haven't told me much but that seems like a strikingly low bar."

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"It is, but I don't have some other, middling master in my history to compare with, it was maybe twelve years of living by myself in my tree and then Thorn."

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Very very still, at that. Not twitchy, exactly, just still. "You were twelve?"

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"Ish? I wasn't keeping close track. I could have been six or eighteen or something."

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"And you're now around sixty?"

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"Something like that. It was - harder to keep track."

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"I bet."

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"How new did you think I was?"

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"If you live quite literally forever, I would expect you to be rather old. Just at random. Of all the numbers, most of them are big. You act young but I thought that might be trauma or a thing about the way fairies are. I am much, much older than you, if our years have anything in common."

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"I act young?"

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"Yes. Which makes sense, because by the standards of my people you are a child and were a very young child when you were taken prisoner by that monster."

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"I've never been a child. I started fully formed."

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"Childhood isn't really about size, it's about - inexperience. In this context. Our first people appeared fully formed but they were still - it would have been monstrous to do to them lots of things it's acceptable to do to adults, because they couldn't be informed in the relevant ways."

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"...my experience with children is what you have told me, offhand mentions in Sirion, negligible conversation with the mortal I met fifty years ago, and the existence of breeder fairy children, where the most important feature of the state of childhood is that they don't come with names and so whoever runs their court names them with the obvious results. So I don't know what you're talking about."

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"If no one has your name when you're born, how does anyone get it?

And - hmm, lots of interaction among people of my kind is about negotiation, I get something I want and you get something you want, and if the other person has far more information, they will out-negotiate you. So high-stakes sorts of negotiations - permanent agreements, agreements with far-reaching consequences, agreements over things of particular value, sex - it is somewhere between 'frowned-upon' and 'evil' to engage in with someone who has vastly less experience than you."
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"I knew it when I started.

Nothing that happened to me was the consequence of information asymmetry, unless you count that I didn't know what would happen when I broke enough to say my name and he did."
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"Okay. Do you want to talk about this topic?"

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"Depends on what you count as 'this topic'."

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"Thorn."

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"I would rather not go into - episodic detail. Otherwise it's fine." She has a stack of drawings to prove it.

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"I am not particularly curious, though if you want to talk I am probably a good audience. I'm assuming if there's things I need to know about apparently-harmless actions that'll cause psychological distress you'll say them, and that if there are things you won't say because you're worried they'd then occur to me and I'd be tempted you'll either ask for my oath not to or find someone else."

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"I'm not really worried you're going to decide to torture me, since I can't think of any good reason for getting a Silmaril to require it. Unless you thought for some reason the Enemy would give you one if you did, I guess. As long as nobody touches me or says my name I don't think there's anything apparently harmless that would be very bad. Anything less bad than that I mean to handle through exposure as it comes up."

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"If getting a Silmaril required torturing you I am entirely sure that my people would stop me." He shudders. "If the possibility causes you substantial distress we could - do another order -"

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"How likely is it?"

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"No chance at all. If the Enemy offered I wouldn't trust him, because I am not an idiot."

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"He can't do the oath thing? Or give the Silmarils to somebody who works for him who can?"

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"He can, but we don't have to entertain a visit from them, and don't let them communicate with us, and would try to kill them on sight. With an enemy like this it's just good strategy. Also, if I can't so much as scratch you, how would I torture you? I don't think the Enemy would think demanding to read your mind counts."

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"By proxy. Or without scratching me. Or both."

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"Do you want an order?"

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"How bad on an ongoing basis is the last one?"
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"I'd sooner cut off a finger, maybe two, but probably not the whole hand."

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"If I can think of a really airtight wording maybe. Not worth it without." She swallows. "If it comes up I can get sort of used to drowning eventually. Very samey."
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"Yeah," he says.

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"Whoever wrote the rules of your world such that I could drown you but not shove you out of the way of a collapsing building was as dumb as they are evil."

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"Well, I wouldn't start drowning instantly on being put in the water and you don't have to save me."

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"Dumb as they are evil."

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"Yeah."

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"Maybe if Maglor has enough time to really teach you composition you can find something that works to get to your world, or to do things to it."

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"...It seems like someone would have noticed if music were magical in my world. Although I guess gates work even though sorcery can only be done on one end."

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"Yes. And you continue not needing to function by the laws of our physics."

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"That's true."

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"So perhaps it could be done." He stands. "Good night."

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"Night."

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And, in the morning, he knocks on the door again.

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And she opens the door.

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And there is food.

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Nom.

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And while she is eating there is shouting outside. He sighs.

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"What's that about?"

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"They brought orcs back. I told them not to, you have other projects. I'll deal with it, don't go downstairs today for an hour or so, all right?"

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"I can't tell if that was enforced unless I try to go downstairs."
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"Are you tempted to? Look, give yourself a few years. Learn music. Then learn about the Enemy."

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"Why'd they bring the orcs?"

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"I had previously given orders to bring a few orcs back alive so you could talk with them about the Enemy and get another perspective on him. Then I decided this was a bad prioritization compared to giving you some mental and emotional space before you worried about war, so I told people not to bring orcs back, but apparently this group was already out and not paying attention. So now we have some orcs, and in an hour we won't, and in a few years when you're ready we'll take some more alive."

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"That makes it sound like you're going to kill these ones if I don't talk to them."
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He looks surprised. "I'm going to kill them either way."

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"...What? Why? Don't they have names?"

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"I have no idea, but that's much crueller than - well, I suppose we could ask them what they prefer."

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"I would assume so."

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"You want to order random orcs to go south and never hurt anyone? That won't bother you?"

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"I don't have enough information to form an opinion on going south but the only problems with an order not to hurt anyone - in the standard case where the recipient isn't you - are bad wording, and the possibility that the recipient would prefer to hurt someone. I can be careful with wording and do not feel particularly inclined to indulge impulses to hurt people."

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"Do you want to meet orcs today?"

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"I wasn't planning on it but if you're going to kill them otherwise I think I can make room in my schedule."

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"They're orcs," he says. "And I'll tell everyone to bring them in after all."

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"Yes, I know they're orcs, that's why they brought them," Promise says.

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He goes still for a while. "I think I'd better just let you speak to them."

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"Well, if you enforced the order about the stairs you're going to have to rescind or override it. Or bring the orcs up here."

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He shudders. "No, they're in the dungeons. You have permission to go down there with me."

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So she gets up and paces him down.

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Orcs are shorter than Elves, hairless, thicker-boned, blotchy-skinned, but very recognizably humanoid. They are chained to the wall. They cower when Maedhros walks in. "I'm going to kill you quickly," he says, "and possibly not even kill you, if you cooperate. Promise?"

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"Hi," she says. "I'm Promise. What are your names?"

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No answers. Resentful stares, from the ones who aren't still cringing against the wall.

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She tries naming them, just in case. Random syllables.
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They are still staring suspiciously.

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And no names snap. Oh well. "I've never met any orcs before," she says.

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"What are you?"

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"I'm a leaflet."

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"Never met any leaflets before."

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"We aren't very common. Don't orcs have names?"

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"I have a name," it says. "I'm not telling it to you."

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"Why not?"

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"You're the enemy, or with them. Why would I? What do you want with it?"

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"I told you what I'm called."

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"What do you want?"

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"I just want to talk to you."

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"Well, here we are. You know he's a monster, right?" Looking over at Maedhros, who is standing stiffly by the doorway.

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"I've heard."

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"And you're working for him. So there's not too much to say."

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"I think if you talk to me enough he might not kill you."

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"That's supposed to tempt us?"

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"Doesn't it?"

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"If he doesn't kill us what's he using us for?"

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"He said something about sending you south."

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"Anything he wants to happen we want to stop."

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"He didn't actually want me to talk to you, at first, he was going to get rid of you without sending me down at all."

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This earns some wary skepticism. "Why not?"

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"He seemed to think this conversation would upset me."

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"He once rode into a village of our people - everyone unarmed, we were washing clothes and cooking food - had everyone dragged out of their homes and lined up kneeling on the road so he could ride by and take off everyone's heads at once. Does that upset you?"

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"Yeah."

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"Why are you working for him, then?"

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"I don't have a lot of options."

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"Melkor'd help you. Get out of here and find someone, they can get you north."

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"Then what?"

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"What would you want? He doesn't like him, he'd probably help you just for that reason. He has powerful magic. He could protect you. If you could protect us he might ask you to help do that in exchange."

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"I've heard bad things about Melkor too, not just from him," she says, indicating Maedhros.

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"Yeah, no Elves like him, and it's about half and half with Men."

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"I haven't met any Men yet. Why don't any Elves like him?"

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They look around at each other. Shrug. "I suppose some of the ones in Elf-land might? All the ones here came here to take our land and destroy us, so if there are ones who don't hate us they wouldn't have come. And we've been at war for a long time, war makes people hate each other."

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"Do you think the Elves are lying about him or just picking and choosing what to say?"

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They all definitely think the Elves are lying. Probably everything Elves say is a lie.

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Well, that seems like a bit of a stretch, she's been able to verify some Elf utterances.

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This earns her a little bit of a smile. Still. Elves. Definitely can't be trusted. Does she want to hear more stories about things Maedhros has done?

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Since she's pretty stuck here she is more interested in learning things about Melkor from his partisans. If she manages to get away it will matter more where she is going than what she is getting away from, won't it?

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Melkor is in charge of the continent and working on repelling the Elf invaders who landed her all those years ago and slaughtered nearly everyone.

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And why isn't he done yet? He's supposed to be very powerful, right?

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He was trying to scare them off first so they'd go away on their own. It was only after they committed lots of massacres that he resorted to killing them, and since then it's gone very fast.

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Where's "away", where are they supposed to go?

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Back to Elfland? Or there's another continent south of here. Melkor even offered Maedhros help moving his people there and resources to get them started once they landed, but Maedhros came to the negotiating table with an army and attacked instead.

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That's very interesting.

Do the orcs happen to know how Maedhros lost his hand? He hasn't told her. (Well. He hasn't.)
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They don't. Maybe he replaced it with a blade so he could kill orcs better.

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Do they happen to know why the Elves came over from Elfland?

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To conquer and kill the orcs and rule this continent.

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Why would anybody move to a new continent specifically to kill orcs?

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They hate us. They enjoy it. He enjoys it especially. Though most Elves don't like killing other Elves as much as he does so maybe he's unusual.

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"But why do they hate you?"

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Shrugs. "We hate them, too. It's just the way the world is."

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"Would you still hate them if they all moved to the south continent?"

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"Yes. We're sworn to hate them."

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"...Sworn to?"

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"Yes. He's sworn to kill everyone who has things he wants, which is much worse."

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She's not so sure about that. "I know. Why are you sworn to hate them, though? Isn't that unnecessary if they're going to do things like slaughter people doing laundry?"

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"We might forget. We don't want to forget."

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"Maybe you could just swear to remind each other periodically?"

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"That's a good idea."

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"Do you swear to do anything else or just hate them?"

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"Some people swear to serve Melkor. Some people swear to try to stop Elves from hurting us."

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"And serving Melkor seems to work out okay for the people who swear it?"

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"Without Melkor the Elves would have killed every orc a long time ago."

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"That doesn't quite answer my question."

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"I don't think Melkor's ever given an order I've heard of that I wouldn't want to follow. I guess maybe if someone wanted to run away instead of defending the wounded and the children, and they were ordered to stay firm and fight?"

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"Doesn't anybody learn to heal instead of fighting?"

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"Yes? But some injuries are too serious to help completely on the spot, and if Elves are still coming..."

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Nod. Sigh.

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"Melkor can teach you lots of magic. He's good at it, and if you stopped helping the Elves he'd want to help you."

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"Isn't he busy doing other things?"

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"He's a Vala, they can do hundreds of things at the same time. He's finishing making the continent safe for us but he'd still teach someone magic if they'd done something scary and hard like left the Elves."

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"What kind of magic?"

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"Shaping the world, making mountains, making new kinds of animals, I don't know what other kinds of things. You could ask him."

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Promise glances at Maedhros. She assumes she's going to get his take on this conversation later; she isn't sure how long he's going to let it go on or how he's tolerating its procession.

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He is expressionless and barely looking at him, though he does catch her eye when she looks in his direction, I am having this transcribed so you can look over it later and we can discuss it then. You may stay here all day if you like.

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"Even if he can do hundreds of things at once that still sounds like a lot of attention to be spending on me. I might not even be very useful."

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"It's not that you'd be useful to him, it's that he likes making people stronger and more capable."

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"Does he do that a lot?"

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Nods. "Like orcs, and werewolves, and tribes of Men, and his servants."

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"He teaches them all magic?"

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"No, just makes us stronger in whatever way does suit us and match our needs and goals."

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"What about you, then, what'd he do for you?"

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"Taught us to fight so we could defend our families against Elves, taught us armor and weapons..."

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This is going in circles and I don't know what else to ask.
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So Maedhros turns away from the wall. "You can either give Promise your name - which will let her tell if you're lying to her - you can swear to answer truthfully for the next hour, or I can kill you now, which would you like?"

A moment of frightened silence from the orcs. Then one volunteers a name. It does not click. Maedhros sighs.
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She was hoping for coaching on ways to steer the conversation, not that -

"It has to be the first name you ever had."
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Another long minute of anxious quiet. Then a different orc, trembling, offers a name. That one clicks.

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"Answer me honestly. Has anything any of you have told me during this conversation been false as far as you know?"

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"I don't remember all of it, I was scared - sometimes Melkor does give people orders they don't like, and most orcs are sworn to him not just some."

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"Most? Which ones aren't?"

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"Babies who are too young to swear."

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"What would happen if one didn't want to?"

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"We'd explain why they should. They always do want to, it's like a rite of passage and you say it with all your friends."

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"What do you think would actually happen to me if I escaped here and went to Melkor?"

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"He'd be very interested in you. He'd probably try to convince you to work for him. If that didn't work he'd probably hold you prisoner. The Elves are doing that too, though, aren't they?"

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"What kind of conditions does he hold his prisoners in?"

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"He makes them work in the mines, usually."

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"What's he mining?"

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"Iron, coal. Mostly. I think. Orcs don't work in the mines usually."

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"Who does?"

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"Prisoners."

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"Where does he usually come by prisoners?"

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"When we conquer an Elf kingdom."

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"Is there a standard procedure for conquering an Elf kingdom?"

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"Some of the Maiar with powerful magic call down power to shake down the walls, and we surround it and take the Elves and march them back to Angband."

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"Is there anything you are hoping I will not ask?" Not what is it, just - is there anything.
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"Yes."

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"Personal things, things about my displayed area of interest, other things, or a mix?"

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"A mix."

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"A mix of which?"

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"Personal things and things about Melkor and orcs and other things."

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"Excluding items you sincerely expect I might agree to be personal, tell me what you have in mind."

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"Questions that'll provoke him so he's likelier to kill us or kill us slower or go out and find our families and kill them. Other peoples' names because this is really scary and they'll be so sad and scared if it happens to them. Questions about the oath we make to Melkor once we're big enough."

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...At the first item she looks at Maedhros again.

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There's nothing they can say that would get me to kill them slowly, unless somehow they had reason to believe that Mandos could help them more if they'd died after breaking their oaths, or something like that. I'd probably not make a concerted effort to kill their family members unless they happen to have family members who are important operatives for the Enemy, or if they have some way of communicating now with family members and so their loved ones know that you exist. In that case I would certainly immediately commit resources to finding them immediately.

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"What is the oath you make to Melkor?"

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"To be orcs, and seek orc greatness, and hate Elves and kill them and take them back as prisoners, and serve Melkor forever."

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"Is swearing to be orcs functional in some way?"
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"I'm not sure. Orcs are made from Elves, so maybe?"

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"Is me knowing your name so awful that you think other orcs would rather die than tell me their names, even if all I did was send them somewhere south and have them not attack anyone?"

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"Not that awful. But you could ask me to betray my friends and dying would be better than that."

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...Promise looks at Maedhros again.

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We do need to ask them if they've communicated in any way with any servant of the Enemy since they met you.

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Besides that.

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No.

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"Is it just that I could or that you think I would?"

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"You might. Might change your mind later, or he might make you."

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"Right, but if I didn't and he didn't, you'd rather be sent south than die?"

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"Yes."

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Sigh.

"Since you were captured, apart from the other orcs in this room, have you communicated with anyone who works for Melkor?"
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"No."

And, Maedhros says, does she have any reason to believe any of them could have been reading her mind.
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"Do you have any reason to believe any such person may have been reading your mind?"

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"Didn't have orders to let them, no."

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Is that good enough for Maedhros?

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He nods. If I thought it were likely I wouldn't have chanced it.

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What do you need a 'go south' order to cover?

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If the Enemy finds them again he'll have them brought back to Angband, rescind their orders, he'll know how you work. They need to get out of anywhere he can find them, without drawing the attention of other orcs to the fact they've been altered. Once they're about two hundred miles south of here I don't think the Enemy's wasting any energy down there, though there are Men and they might shoot orcs on sight.

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...He's not a fairy, he can't rescind their orders. Unless oaths interact with orders in a way I don't expect and you didn't seem to expect regarding not sending me out after the Silmaril I got you again.

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Oaths don't bother you if you're doing everything you can towards them, and if you're mind-controlled not to do it that counts. He's a Vala and I don't know if he could imitate fairy magic if he had some to work off. Though it'd probably take a long time and in the meantime all he'd be able to do is learn from them how you work, which is still no good.

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If you can't chance sending them south because he might find them on their way south enough then I feel very misled.

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I'll send them with an escort.

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Okay. What else do you need from them?

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I'm curious what their orders from Melkor are right now but you don't have to ask.

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How's, 'go docilely and without straying with the escort to be provided until they leave you, and then avoid traveling further north than that point. Avoid contact with Melkor and those in his service; and except in immediate defense of yourselves and each other, or to avoid that contact, commit no violence'?

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And if they contact those in Melkor's service, behave in whatever way seems least likely to draw attention to or allow anyone to guess anything is up.

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Do you want them to revert to normal behavior entirely under those conditions except for not mentioning me or this incident in any way, or something more complicated?

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'normal' is probably not safest but it might be the safest thing you can cleanly order.

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What're they supposed to say about how far south they were?

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Orders they can't share, probably.

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...that won't work if Melkor asks them.

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If it comes to his attention we're in trouble, he'll just read their minds. I want to minimize the likelihood that it does that in the first place. He has millions of orcs.

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Oh. Okay. 'If contacted by someone in Melkor's service, behave as though your location was due to orders from Melkor you do not have leave to share since discharged, and proceed to act as though this is the case without any mention or allusion however oblique to your capture or my existence'?

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That works.

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Anything else?

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You could try your healing spell on them. Orcs are in constant pain. I don't think it'll do much but it's worth attempting. We did, sometimes, and they always refused to tell us whether it did anything.

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"Do you mind if I try a healing song on you?" Promise asks the orcs.
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They do mind. No Elf-magic, thank you.

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She thinks this is their prerogative. Is Maedhros going to make her do it anyway?

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He is not.

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Right then.

"If you would rather die than be sent south or risk him deciding to do something that isn't sending you south, that is up to you. If you would prefer to be sent south than let him kill you I need your real names."
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All but one give their names.

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And she repeats the agreed-upon order set.

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And he has someone escort them all out, the one who did not agree separately.

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Good. She doesn't have to look.

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He seems to prefer that she doesn't. "There's still some time in the day. Music lessons, or do you want time alone, or do you want to talk?"

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"I'm curious what you have to say about the conversation."
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"They must have standing orders to give a recruitment talk to anyone they meet who's not an Elf. Us they mostly just spit at and scowl at. I have the transcripts so you can look through them if there are specific things you want to ask about."

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"The thing about the town with the orcs doing laundry -"
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"It amuses the Enemy sometimes to order his soldiers to carry out some atrocity - in that case, burning a village and nailing all its inhabitants to trees around the area - and then to order them to put away their weapons and settle down peaceably, so when we track them from the site of the crime we find innocents. And I suppose they are innocents. Just following orders."

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"What would you do, in my place? Let them go whenever their orders do not currently involve the rape and torture and slaughter of my people?"

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"If you could prevent them from getting new orders maybe."

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"I can't. They can be delivered telepathically at a range of hundreds of miles."

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"Does that answer your question?"

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"Yeah."

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"I am not a good person. But in my place you either died heroically very early or you stopped being a good person or you stopped - making decisions at all, stopped trying to steer the world."

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"You can say what's on your mind."

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"I bet it would be very tempting to say that even if there were a thing you could have done, somewhere in there, that I don't know about, which would have made it better."
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He nods. "I bet it would.

I have not gone to any particular effort to hide my crimes from you."
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"I know."

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"That doesn't make it less likely that I am hiding alternatives?"

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"I don't know."

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"Do you agree with me that the Enemy needs to be stopped?"

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"It seems likeliest."

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"What else seems likely?"

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"Nothing else has risen all the way to the level of 'likely'."

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"I am willing to swear to you that I have not, since you returned with the Silmaril, withheld any information from you that I think you'd want to know. Or is your concern more that I'd have developed a willful blindness to solutions less satisfying than killing orcs?"

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"You were going to kill all of those ones and only one of them turned out to prefer that."

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"I do expect I am bad at plans that involve weighing how much people object to being mind-controlled. Because to me it is so obviously much worse than death that even knowing not everyone finds it such, it's difficult to have good intuitions about when to use it.

I did not previously have mind control as a tool at my disposal."
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"I don't actually consider most uses of orders mind control per se. - I might take a little while to work through a similar blind spot about mind reading, I guess."

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He nods. "Did you have other questions?"

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"Nothing in particular. But I would like to have the transcript."

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Someone brings it. Hands it to her, looks anxiously between her and Maedhros.

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...Promise isn't sure how to parse that look, but she accepts the transcript.

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"You're dismissed," Maedhros says, and the scribe leaves.

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"Was she telepathing something or just looking at you funny?"
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"Worrying. On the topic we discussed yesterday."

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"I would at this time actually rather not be forcefed because I don't see how it could be done without touching me."
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"I will make sure everyone knows that."

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"If they'd believe you."

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"Another advantage of consistently being honest with your subjects is that they believe you."

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"Fair enough."

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"It took me about five years to find touch tolerable and about fifty to occasionally find it comforting. If that is of any use to you as a reference point. It is also perfectly legitimate to prefer never being touched again, lots of people live happy lives with that preference."

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"It is maybe useful as a reference point."

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He walks out into the courtyard. Sits down in the sun.

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She goes to where she has her music lessons.
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And Maglor is happy to teach her more songs.

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Songs are nice.

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He again does not notice the sun setting.

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She can finish the bit of thing they're working on, but then excuses herself to go eat.

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Maedhros meets her there.

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Food.

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And silence, unless she wants to start a conversation.

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"Are you going to bring any more orcs?"
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"I don't think so. You have the information that I'm not lying at least about the oaths and the orders and the fact the Enemy would certainly try to hold you prisoner and torture you. If you think of more questions I can bring you more orcs, but otherwise I'll have our guards back on normal procedures."

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"I - I just meant to send them south."

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"I can't spare escorts for all of them."

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"That's not unwillingness, it's literal incapacity. There are around a thousand of us left, everyone's on an exhausting duty rotation to keep us fed and safe, I can spare perhaps twenty for occasional escort missions but I can't start an orc-exporting business."

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"I didn't say anything."

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"I hope it is obvious at this point that I'm likely to explain myself and not likely to retaliate when you do say things, so you don't have to just make wounded faces at me."

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"I anticipated the explanation, or something in its vicinity."

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"One advantage of my fearsome reputation is that orcs give me a very wide berth unless specifically ordered to do otherwise. We don't actually kill very many."

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"How many is not very many?"

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"A few hundred a year, probably."

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"How many would be a lot?"
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"During the siege of Himring during the Dagor Bragollach I probably killed thousands of orcs every day, hundreds of thousands over the course of the two years."

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"Those were, for the record, all armed and trying to kill me and succeeding at killing countless innocent people."

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"I've never met that many people in my life."

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"There are so many orcs, and all of them are suffering, and all of them are under Morgoth's control."

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"Why do you call him that?"

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"It's the name he's known by in these lands. Melkor is the title of his choosing, and his enemies do not acknowledge it."

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He raises an eyebrow. "You done eating?"

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"Yeah."

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"Good night."

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"Good night."

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Maglor has not commented on the fact Maedhros has started sleeping in his rooms, or is sleeping even worse than usual. The two of them don't talk much anymore. Sometimes Maedhros will reach out and squeeze his arm, as if checking if he's really there. Sometimes he will be in the corner of the room and not sleep at all.

This night is a bad night.
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Promise has not given any thought to her master's sleeping arrangements, because they mercifully do not impinge on her own.

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And in the morning there is food.

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She does not have anything to say over breakfast.

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Well, he's certainly not going to. Music lessons?

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Yeah. Music is nice. She is not going to sit around and mope.

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Everyone sits around and mopes; they probably wouldn't mind. She learns some new songs.

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She'd mind. Moping is unproductive and no fun. Music is productive and fun. She is not going to bring any orcs back by moping.

Her voice improves with practice; she was untrained, not particularly untalented.
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And time passes in this unhappy fortress of the remnants of a people.

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She learns songs, and gets pretty good at following musical notation, and trills stacks of chords with increasing fluidity. She sits in the courtyard and sings and makes it look like what she remembers of the forest around her tree. Once; she doesn't do that again. She isn't sure how Maedhros is planning to deploy her against Melkor if he doesn't know his real name. Maybe he's figuring out how to get ahold of it.

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He is. He can ask her to ask Ulmo. This will get the Valar's attention, probably catastrophically, but their anger if they are angry shouldn't come down on Promise. He is waiting mostly for her to twitch less when spoken to, though that might take decades. He finds a copy of the Ainulindalë and puts it with the books she occasionally reads. None of the other Valar click.

Well.

"Promise," he says eventually, "I think you should go to the ocean and talk with Ulmo."
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"Um," she says. "What would I say?"

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"Can you give orders without making it obvious you've done so?"

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"...Sort of. I can say 'please' and fold them into sentences and he'll only notice if he tries not to do whatever I say, it might be easier to miss if I give him a lot of temporal leeway like 'at your convenience' or whatever..."

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"He also might answer if asked, he has no reason to help Morgoth and is helpful generally. You can approach it how you see fit. Ordering him not to tell the other Valar that you have power over him isn't a good idea; I think they can all read each other all the time."

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"Melkor's a Vala too, right, you said he reads minds only more so - does Ulmo -"
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"I don't know. Probably in the broad sense. He'd be reading to determine that you're pure of heart and don't serve the enemy and unless he were interested not more than that, and of course you can say 'please don't read me, it frightens me' or whatever."

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"Oh."

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"If you don't think you can do this, it can wait. I don't know for how long it can wait, but the Enemy hasn't bothered moving against us yet."

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"It's just a very high-uncertainty situation. I could have salvaged it if I'd screwed up in Sirion, I knew a lot of names there and they were all mortals, not -"

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"Even if somehow orders don't work and he figures out everything that's going on, I don't expect that he would harm you."

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"Why wouldn't he?"

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"In - the way the Valar think -there are those who are outside their concern, like the Avari who didn't come to Valinor and who the Valar accordingly won't aid - there are innocents, there are those who have justly been sentenced, and there are enemies. And also, mortals really don't matter and you might drown one if you don't have any particular fate in store for them or if they'd annoyed you. Elves matter more, the Maiar much much more - they keep offering their own second chances. So you'd matter by their lights."

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"...so because he couldn't kill me he probably wouldn't even drown me."

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"Yes. Also you're a victim of me, he hates my family particularly. I think the worst case scenario is that he reads your mind and that's very distressing for you and then he whisks you off to Valinor so they can decide how to send you back to Fairyland."

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"...what happens if he whisks me off to Valinor in the meantime?"

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"You get Vala'd at. They're rather intimidating but they do not deign to personally injure anyone. They'd probably figure out how to rescind any orders I gave you."

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"- so they'd forcefeed me or read my name out of my head."

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"The latter. Promise, if you don't do this then I do not know how long we have but eventually Morgoth will come for us, and he will use you to conquer and torture his way across this world. Inaction is not a safe choice either."

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"You have permission to go down to the ocean and try to give Ulmo orders, or give orders to others that help you get Morgoth's name. You do not have to do it. if you get the name, come straight back."

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"Where's the shore?"
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He pulls out a map and shows her.

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"Is there anything else I should know?"

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"Nothing comes to mind."

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And so when she is recently fed and slept -

she flies to the sea.
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Ulmo does not immediately materialize to greet her. Maedhros said that he would hear her.

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"Excuse me," she says, "Ulmo, um, I need to talk to you."
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Waves crash against the shore. Nothing materializes.

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She sits in the sand. She watches the water. She'll give him a minute.

If nothing shows up, "It's a little urgent, if you're not very busy I would appreciate it if you'd come talk to me now."
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Waves, crashing. And then, a sensation of pressure and unnatural silence like she's underwater, and a sudden roaring presence in her head -

These shores are foreign to you, child.
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Please, it frightens me to have my mind read, please don't. She swallows. Um, yes, I'm not from here. I got lost.

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Is that the urgent need that calls you here?

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Not exactly. I don't know if anybody here can help me get home. I wanted to ask you if you could please tell me Melkor's real name?

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The names of our kind are not in a language familiar to your people.

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My people don't have a language, we just - talk. I should be able to understand it.

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And to what end do you seek such understanding?

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If I have his real name he won't be able to hurt me. Please tell me?

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And he does. None of the sounds in it are sounds a human mouth could shape; a wordless, racing shriek. I fear he will still be able to hurt you, child.

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Click. Only indirectly. This helps. Thank you. I'm sorry to have interrupted you.

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You have not. I hope you find it the aid that you require.

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Thank you.

And she flies back to the fortress.
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He does not look good, when she sees him. He looks like he is barely standing, his face is bloodless and motionless, he summons a smile only once she lands and it's a smile she's never seen on his face before. "How did it go?"

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"Fine..." Truthfully and completely. "- I don't think he noticed and I don't think he mindread anything sensitive before he stopped and I have the name now..."
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He relaxes. A little. "Do you think you can use it?"

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"I don't see why not..." Something is wrong. She's allowed to put out her ears, is there anything long and sharp -

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He watches her. His face is contorted with some kind of terrible pain. That's not going to be enough, he says, you are going to have to think of something else -

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- right. Telepathy. Shit. What happened. - Non-ordered vassals - she rockets into the air, yelling, "HELP" - flies low, she can't take food but she can be easy to catch -

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He told them not to touch her. He told them she didn't want to be force-fed - he can delay, that is allhe can do, and from the intensity of the current pain the Oath is not amused -

(Another fairy had crashed in nearly the same spot, he'd heard the terrified thoughts and thought he could at least manage things better, the second time, had gone out to meet him, and as he'd walked in the world had frozen around him, so he couldn't move -

"I swear to you," Thauron had said, "that I have the power to give you the remaining two Silmarils, that I have leave to do so, and that if you tell me the fairy's name I will give you both Silmarils."

"I don't want them," he'd said truthfully, not that it mattered at all.)

He could delay. He was delaying.
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"I CHANGED MY MIND HELP HELP HELP SOMEBDOY"

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Someone grabs her, drags her down to the ground, looks around in a blind panic and suddenly the Oath does not actually allow him to delay at all - Promise, what's your name - just think it at me, everyone else doesn't have to hear -

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Alisyrrabel

She doesn't have to struggle out of the grip yet, she can go limp, she can't open her mouth, she can't "accept" food but she doesn't have to bite them -
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He does not consciously decide to pass it on, he is not consciously deciding anything at that point, but Thauron is listening anyway, is maybe present in his head more often than not, and -

Alisyrrabel, a new voice in her head says, amused, Leave the fortress immediately.
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Now she has to struggle, but she weighs thirty pounds, come on, get something down her throat -

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They're disconcerted when she starts struggling.

Order Maedhros to prevent them from feeding you. Order everyone whose names you know to stop them.
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Stop them from feeding me, she relays helplessly. She doesn't know that many names, she doesn't talk much to anyone but him and Maglor -

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Maedhros stands. "Stop," he says, "let her go -" and they hesitate further - and Maglor rushes to his brother's side - "stop touching her," he says -

"She said she changed her mind -"

They both shake their heads.

And now no one is holding on to her.
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She leaves the fortress, he didn't say which way to go from there, flaps as fast as she can in the direction of the shore, she still has blanket permission to order Ulmo she can give him her name make him protect her -

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Land. Do not speak. Do not communicate by any other means with anyone except me. A pause. Actually, telepathically give Maedhros random orders every hour or so. Do not give him any which advance any of your goals or his.

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She lands. She doesn't speak.

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He finds her a few minutes later. He's a tall, handsome, pleasant-looking man. He walks up to her and runs his fingers down her cheek and then smiles at her, quite delightedly.

Stop shielding your thoughts from me.
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She shivers. But he can't make her do that he can't make her not think about her tree tree tree tree tree

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He frowns. Fly directly to Angband at your top speed. Do not fly low enough that anyone could stop you. If you are not progressing towards Angband, you do not have permission to move.

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She flies towards Angband, high in the air.

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Nothing disturbs her flight.

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Oh, come on, can't she have misjudged arrow range and overflown Sirion - is there any ocean around here, some inlet -

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No ocean. Forests and mountain ranges. If there are people there they don't shoot at her.

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So she flies and flies and her top speed decreases as her wings tire out and she flies.

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Angband is much larger than the Feanorian fortress, and black, and built into the mountains.

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Once she is pretty sure she is inside the scope of that which is called Angband she -

- can't actually land because she has to fly high enough that no one can stop her. She proceeds until she is over the center of Angband and then, not progressing 'toward Angband', no longer has permission to move and falls, that incompetent evil bastard.
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He comes out to fetch her a minute later. Very nicely done, he says. Come inside and meet Melkor.

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She goes inside.

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It's thirty or so stories tall, and there's activity everywhere, thousands upon thousands of orcs, a constant roiling sea of them. They mostly give her a wide berth. It's dark. As they go down it gets darker. People can be heard, distantly, screaming. He keeps a hand on her shoulder.

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Of fucking course he does. She can't move except for "coming inside", so she can't roll up her wings or move her arms or even look around very much.

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The first thing she notices about the throne room is the light. Silmaril light; distinctive anyway, but far moreso below ground like this. It's brilliant, makes the cavern look like a majestic work of art. There's someone twenty feet tall, black-armored or else made out of black metal, sitting there.

Kneel, the man beside her says.
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She kneels.

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"Hello," Morgoth says. He must have already been told her name, because the next words are orders. "You can speak to answer questions addressed to you. Tell me everything I might want to know about how fairies work."

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Well, what might he want to know, he was unspecific about order. "We're all winged humanoids but design otherwise varies a lot. We eat plants."

He was unspecific about truth.

"Fairies come in a variety of kinds each of which have their own powers. My kind, if completely physically obliterated, returns with the ability to do sorcery outside of Fairyland, which is otherwise impossible -"
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"Orders," Sauron says. "Explain truthfully and completely how orders work."

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"Orders can be delivered to or by any fairy. Someone who can order someone else, at least if able to act freely and unobstructed in communicating, is called their master; and those they can in principle order are their vassals. The ordering party must have fed the ordered while not already being the ordered's vassal at the time; or the ordering party must know the ordered's original name, full name in the case of a fairy vassal, partial in the case of a non-fairy vassal. Orders are fulfilled to the letter with slight but not overwhelming acknowledgment of master intent in fine-grained definitions. They can only cover volitional actions. More recent orders take precedence where there is conflict but old orders otherwise stand until rescinded or overridden. Orders cannot prevent a vassal from thinking about a topic outright. It is impossible for a vassal to harm a master even if ordered to do so. Orders wear off if the ordering party forgets the name of the ordered or if the ordering party dies. Enforcement of an order is optional and inaudible. Orders can work in writing if and only if the vassal directly observes the writing; the orders take effect then, not later."

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"All right," he says. "I order you to act exactly as you think I would order you to act if I understood orders perfectly."

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She rolls her wings up. "I know your name but not his. My current orders forbid me to move except as directed by new, enforced orders or if I am removed from Angband. They forbid me to enforce orders except on designated recipients. They have me trying to guess when it's been about an hour so I can think of something to tell Maedhros to do but it's supposed to be 'random' which is difficult to do without a source of randomness and I haven't settled on an interpretation yet. I do not expect more fairies to enter this world for the foreseeable future or for there to be a way to access Fairyland in that time. I am immortal but not more durable than a mortal would be against any particular injury. Ordering hostile vassals is very difficult and this stopgap will not serve you in the long term."

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"How do fairies usually manage hostile vassals?"

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"They get very, very good at issuing airtight orders, rely on themselves or non-hostile vassals for sensitive tasks if possible, they make sure escape is not a relatively appealing alternative if possible, they give self-incapacitating contingency orders in case of failure, and they make liberal use of qualifiers like 'sincere' and questions about the state of mind of the vassal."

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"Is there a commitment I can offer you that would make you not a hostile vassal?"

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"I don't know what the spectrum of commitments you'd be prepared to offer for that would be, but in principle you could get me considerably less hostile."

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"I plan to command the Valar and control this world. I have no particular designs on yours and am happy to grant you significant latitude if I could be confident you would not use it to work against me."

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"I am opposed to torture and death in general, would like to go home eventually if there's a way to do that from here after all, hold up better psychologically given time to draw, want him to stop touching me..."

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He raises an eyebrow at Sauron, who does not take his hand off her shoulder. "It doesn't sound like we can be happy collaborators, then. Tell me, if you had the names of the Valar and ordered them to obey me, how would you expect that to go wrong from my perspective?"

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If he understood orders perfectly he would have fucking qualified that for truth and therefore - "They could interpret your instructions. They could do things to avoid hearing them. They might have some way to break fairy control, yours over me or mine over them, because they're Valar. They could warn each other if I didn't speak to them all at once. They could render me unable to communicate before I finished the order."

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He nods. "Very well. Sauron, I think you owe someone the Silmarils. Kill him and bring them right back. Fairy, climb up here and sit where you can see, and then order all the orcs in this room to kill themselves. I shall feed you names."

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Promise gamely attempts to climb. She is pretty bad at it. She falls.

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He picks her us, sets her level with his shoulder.

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...well. She can see from there.

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And he can give her names.

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And she can tell orcs to kill themselves.

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He gets bored before Sauron gets back. He tries lighting her on fire. That doesn't work. He tries crushing her. That doesn't work. This is intriguing. "Why can't I hurt you?"

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"Because I know your name."

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"Hmm. Jump down from there."

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She jumps.

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He picks her up and puts her back. "Could I order the orcs to injure you? Could I order you to injure yourself?"

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"Yes."

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He feeds her more names, instead.

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She is still under orders to tell the orcs to kill themselves if they're in the room.

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Sauron comes back. He has three Silmarils. Melkor stops feeding her names.

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So she sits there.

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They confer for a moment. Sauron tests whether he can hurt her by breaking several bones, remotely, from where he's standing on the ground. Morgoth is not amused. He lights a section of the ground on fire and tells Promise to go stand there.

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She goes. She screams.

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"Don't make noise," he says, and they confer a while longer.

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She stops screaming.

Eventually there is not enough of her to be awake.
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He stops the fire at that point. He keeps the area clear and one fragment of his attention on watching her heal.

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Well, she's not doing it very fast. You wouldn't know it was happening, to look at her. But she's breathing.
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He can be patient. Every once in a while he sends her orc names, in case she's conscious enough to get back to work.

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Nope, she's out.

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It's only a fragment of his attention; most of it was preparing to war with the Valar, and still is.

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If nothing heals her she's just going to sort of be an unconscious breathing burned husk for weeks.
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The Silmarils do healing. Isn't that helpful of them! There they are, all three of them, twinkling and healing.

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Okay, so she'll wake up a little sooner than that.

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Melkor is many millions of years old and not very impatient. Sauron is impatient but also, it happens, distracted.

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She's still not allowed to move and doesn't really want to.

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She's still getting orc names occasionally.

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She has not yet recovered the ability to talk, so she doesn't have to do anything with them.

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Eventually Sauron is less distracted. He comes over, stands next to her, heals her. "For Melkor a million years is not a long time," he says. "For me it rather is, and you've had your extended convalescence. Order Maedhros not to give you any orders."

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She looks around. He's not here. Don't give me any orders, she relays by telepathy.

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"Order him to tell me how I can get you to stop thinking privately."

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Blink. Tell Sauron how he can get me to stop thinking privately.

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Can't be done, Maedhros responds at once. It's an innate feature of fairies.

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Promise doesn't have to contradict him. She doesn't have to act like Sauron knows how to give good orders.

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He looks exasperated. "Tell him to come here, and not take any other actions."

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Come here and take no other actions.

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"We're going to be waiting a while," he says lightly, "I'm quite sure he can't walk. Tell me what you're thinking right now."

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"I hate you and the cube root of nine trillion four hundred billion three hundred seventeen million six hundred two thousand one hundred nine is probably not too far off from twenty thousand which multiplied by itself thrice is twenty times twenty times is four hundred thousand times twenty is eight trillion so that's too low. Twenty-five thousand multiplied by itself thrice is -"

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"Stop.



What's the most unpleasant order you have ever been given?"
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She can't answer him. She is busy being stopped. Doesn't involve breathing.

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"Answer me."

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He didn't say truthfully. Fucking idiot. Thank goodness. "'Cooperate with Sunstroke until I come back'."

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His eyes narrow. "Truthfully."

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There's not a verb in there.

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He twitches a finger and something slaps her. "Answer all my questions truthfully."

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She can't prop herself up from having been slapped. And she still can't say anything because she's on a stop plus a whitelist and he hasn't asked anything since telling her to answer him.

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Maitimo, darling, he says, you by all accounts took to enslaving people like a natural. Promise, order him to truthfully explain to me how you are avoiding questions.

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Truthfully explain how I am avoiding questions, she parrots.

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I don't know. I can barely hear you two and don't know what orders she's under.

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There you go. Asshole.

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"Explain to me how I should have phrased my questions so far in order to get what I want."

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"Remembering the recency rule and putting verbs in your sentences."

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"I expect it'll take us a thousand years to become sufficiently competent in the way your language works that we can be confident of our expect intent being carried about. But I think the Valar will leave us alone for that long. I do appreciate the tutorial. Tell me truthfully what the mistakes are that we've made so far."

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"Forgetting the recency rule. Not putting verbs in your sentences." Not saying 'completely'.

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He lights the floor beneath her on fire again. Just for a minute, while he's getting control of his temper.

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She can't scream.

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He puts it out.

Maedhros arrives. He is crawling. He is missing most of the left side of his face. "Order him to tell me what he's thinking."
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"Tell him what you're thinking," she coughs.

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"Almost all of my attention is occupied by screaming panic at the existence of orders and the fact there is someone who can give me orders and the fact she is doing it and the fact you are making her. The rest of my attention is mostly dedicated to thinking about how I could have avoided this if I'd been in possession of a larger share of my wits when I'd found her, and extrapolating from that to determine how many obvious ways to get out of here I am missing because of the current state of paralyzing screaming panic.

Oh, and amusement at how outmatched you are. I am definitely experiencing amusement at how outmatched you are."
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She can't laugh.

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"Order him to always answer questions truthfully," he says, frowning, "and with all relevant information."

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"Always answer questions truthfully and with all relevant information."

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Maedhros does not respond to this. He has reached them, and has now stopped moving.

"What did you order the fairy to do?"

"Not hurt anyone," he says, "not order anyone, get the Silmaril - she got an exception to not ordering anyone, for that - not eat from anyone's hand but mine, send the orcs she wanted to save south, get Melkor's name - she got an exception to not ordering anyone for that, too. Not use the names she knew. Stop other fairies if they tried to take me or anyone else prisoner. Arrange my death if I was in a situation with a fairy giving me orders which she couldn't get me out of. There might have been others I can't remember."

"Why did she cooperate with you?"

"I am told," he says, "I am among the most likeable mass murderers out there. Also, didn't torture her. Also, she might have believed me that the Enemy was worth stopping. Didn't press her on whether she did."

Sauron raises an eyebrow at her. "Always answer questions truthfully and with all relevant information. Is there anything important he's missing?"
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"I didn't have anywhere else that seemed like a better idea for where to go even though I could have gotten away. I don't hold people too responsible for what their masters tell them to do and interpret his oath as something similar. And he didn't touch me."

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"Well," he says. "Order him to."

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"Touch me."

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So he crawls forward and puts a shaking hand on her foot. And Sauron flickers his fingers again and suddenly he is not injured.

"You give him too much credit for that," Sauron says, "it's not that he's too noble to take advantage, it's that he doesn't like girls. Tell him to pretend you're his boyfriend."
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Tell doesn't mean order. "Pretend I'm your boyfriend," she says anyway, and every time she uses a loophole she risks Sauron closing it later but the alternative is not using them.

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He does not move.

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She cannot move.

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Sauron is sufficiently frustrated to light her on fire again. "Tell me why that didn't work."

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That's not a question. She has to answer, and it has to be a real reason because otherwise it's not 'why that didn't work', but it doesn't have to be complete and it doesn't have to be all relevant information. "Maybe he and his boyfriend wouldn't be in the mood with you standing over them."

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Fire goes out. "Maitimo, why -"

"We'd spend at least a few decades talking about our feelings," he says, "and the fact I got him killed, and the things I've done since then -"

"I want you," says Sauron, "to hold her down and fuck her."

That's not an order. He doesn't move.

"Fairy, order him."
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Rescind all my orders.

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I rescind all your orders.

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And this is really about time.

Listen. HELP.

Ulmo can hear her near the sea.

Maybe Eru can hear her from here.
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The castle cracks open above them.

No, doesn't crack open, just ceases existing in a manner that is patterned like a widening crack.
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Oh good. She was worried that wasn't going to work. Attempt no circumvention or retaliation against me. Give me Sauron's name. Prevent him and Melkor from acting. Protect me and Maedhros from inconvenient consequences of this prevention.

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Sauron's name, first, a deep and terrible trill. Sauron himself is not moving. Not at all. Nor is Morgoth. Nor is anyone except her and Maedhros, though he's still under orders to take no new action -

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Tell me what true facts I am most likely to value in this situation.

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Morgoth holds the oaths of all orcs and could release them. Morgoth engineered the suffering of all orcs and could end it at will. Morgoth cannot be vanquished without the destruction of the continent. Angband is collapsing. I can release people from oaths that were spoken before me, such as the oath of the house of Fëanor. Celebrimbor, who is still alive, could with Sauron's aid build a gate back to your home world. The names of the Valar are - and he shares them.

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She thinks at Melkor. He's probably around somewhere. Stop Angband from collapsing. End the suffering of the orcs. Release the oaths of the orcs.

To Maedhros, "Tell me, d'you want out of your oath?"
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"Yes."

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"If I have him release it from everybody who took it do you anticipate any objections?"

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"...maybe but please do it anyway."

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Release the oath of the House of Fëanor.

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I have done so.

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Tell me: in your sincere estimation am I likely to regret it if I let you act freely?

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I dislike fairy orders and will probably revise the world so they don't work here, or on my children should they visit other worlds. You might desire some of the dead returned to life who would not otherwise have been, or returned to life sooner. You might desire to change the fates of some people. If it is Maedhros's sincere desire to stop existing no one short of me can do that.

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Don't attempt to get out from under my orders delivered of my own uncommanded will, nor to prevent me from delivering them. "Oh - you may act freely," she adds to Maedhros. "But please don't kill Sauron, I might need him for something. Eru says if you really want to stop existing you'll need him for that specifically."

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"Eru's name worked?" He does not kill Sauron. He is pretty sure killing Sauron wouldn't even work. "And yes, I would, though I'd appreciate it if you told my brothers that this worked."

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"...Yes. What did you think I did?" she asks. "Can I have you around for general advice and consultation while I try not to make any stupid mistakes wielding this deity or should I ask Maglor?"

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"I am available for advice and consultation. Please don't give me orders."

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"Don't anticipate having to with your oath gone," she says. "Eru thinks I might want some people alive earlier than planned or some fates changed."

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"Normally when we die we go to Mandos, and he judges when we're suitable to be given another body. To the extent your judgment of that differs from his you might, yeah. Fates changed - I assume he means making mortals immortal, or vice versa."

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"He didn't specify. I'm unclear on how fate is supposed to work."

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"Us too. This, ah, wasn't in it." He looks wonderingly at the sky.

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"What do you suppose would happen if I just told him that everyone in Mandos who wants to be alive should be alive?"

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"Then a lot of orcs would be alive, and they're not sworn to hate us any more but they have other reasons to, in many cases, and they'd all be in Valinor, and the Valar might just kill them again. 'Alive and somewhere where they have the resources they need to stay that way and no one they have a serious grievance with' would be better but correspondingly less airtight. You could just go with 'alive, and in a way I won't regret.'?"

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"Leaves him lots of leeway and it turns out he's not a fan of fairy orders... might have to work more piecemeal. Do you need several decades to say goodbye to your boyfriend before you stop existing, I could start there."

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"He won't let me. Bring him back with the rest of his family somewhere safe and far away from me."

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"He won't let you?"

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"Well, he couldn't stop me but I wouldn't be able to go through with it."

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"Is that bad?"
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"There are fairy orders in the world, I want to not exist, I am pretending to hold it together for you because it will not help anything if I curl up sobbing on the ground right now, I owe too many people too many things to abandon them but that does not make my existence tolerable to me."

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"I can let Eru make them stop working on you, he kind of wants to do that anyway."
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"Please do that."

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Render Maedhros unable to give or receive fairy orders.

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I have done so.

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"Done. Does that help?"

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"Yes."

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She glances around. "Apparently Sauron and Celebrimbor-who-is-alive could make me a gate, but since I don't know where Celebrimbor is, standing near Sauron right now just seems pointlessly unpleasant. Also I would prefer to be wearing clothes. What say we address these problems." And she seeks an exit.

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"Celebrimbor is my nephew. He's on the isle of Balar. Near Sirion. If you're bringing the dead back, my father could also make you a gate. No Sauron required."

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"Where do the orcs keep their fabric," she mutters. "Eru didn't mention that option. Possibly because he's dead."

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"He's been dead for a very long time, might take a while to get adjusted. Can you not ask orcs about the fabric? Or steal one of their shirts?"

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"Yeah, I suppose." She looks for orcs.

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They are kind of fleeing, for the most part.

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"Excuse me!" she calls. "Excuse me, I just need to know where you keep clothes around here!"

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They keep fleeing, but Maedhros points her down one corridor, then another, to something looking very much like an orc clothing store.

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Okay cool what have they got in "backless".

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She could rip things up?

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She will rip things up. There. Now she is dressed.

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He does not give any sign of noticing. "What's your next priority?"

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"Good question. I didn't plan this in very much detail, I was concentrating on looking for an opening. There might be non-orcs around here besides us. I'm still pretty singed. There's probably still a war going on by default even with the orcs free, that's no good."

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"There'll be other prisoners, yes. I think I know where. Can you heal yourself while we walk?"

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"Yeah." She sings and follows him.

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There are other prisoners. Hundreds of them, chained mostly to each other, with nervous orc guards some of whom are still at their posts. They recognize Maedhros. All of them are in variously horrifying states. "Sauron can do healing," he says to her.

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Taking no extraneous action, heal the prisoners.
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Sauron joins them a minute later and walks between them, silently. Some of them recoil from him. Maedhros watches fixedly.

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"I have him under control. I won't let him hurt you."

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This doesn't reassure them much. They don't fight back, though.

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When Sauron has healed them she tells him to, with absolutely minimal approach/contact/bothering of the prisoners, let them all go.

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This requires unchaining them one by one. Maedhros is rubbing restlessly at the stump of his hand.

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"Do you want me to have that fixed? It can probably be fixed," Promise says.
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"Not by him," Maedhros says. "I can feel him. If Eru cares to personally do it, sure."

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"I meant Eru," Promise says. "But if you want him to care to personally do things I have the impression you might wait a while."

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"I'm pretty good with the one hand. Let me know when you're ready to think about bringing back the dead and ending the war, that's more my area of expertise."

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"Okay. I suppose I can also just do it myself whenever there's a gate, if you haven't decided to be obliterated by then." When Sauron has let everybody go she sends him to go wait where she left him before.

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"Do you want to address the prisoners, or do you want me to? Or should we wait until we tell them what we're doing about orcs?"

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"...You probably know more about what this brand of prisoners wants to hear than I do. I'm not sure what to do about orcs yet."

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"Easiest thing would be to relocate them to a continent with no Elves or Men, hope that by the time they invent transoceanic sailing the old wounds on both sides will have healed. Is there a continent with no Elves or Men? If not, Eru can raise one out of the ocean."

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Is there an uninhabited continent?

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No.

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"Continents are all inhabited. Having him raise a continent seems like it would have side effects if I didn't know enough about how continents worked or something."

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"And if he were inclined to fuck things up. He knows how to do it without side effects, it's how Valinor came around. ...you could relocate everyone in Valinor here and all the orcs to Valinor."

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"Why that way around?"
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"Valinor is perfectly safe and everything is edible and it's meant to be a paradise. A million orcs used to taking orders from Melkor, or dead since who-knows-when, are more in need of that than we are. Everyone in Valinor will be super annoyed to end up here but annoyed is all, the Eldar aren't innately inclined to war and we know how to build cities and agriculture and so forth."

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"What about the Valar, would I have to order them around not to make trouble with this plan?"

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"There's no way you're bringing back any of the dead without giving the Valar orders. Or, I guess, ordering Eru to tell them you have his permission."

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"...Okay, but that isn't what I asked."

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"Yes, they will object to anyone except Elves who they've vetted for purity being permitted in Valinor. I think it's worth it anyway because it's the most cut-off from the other continents, hard for accidental contact to occur, aforementioned paradise considerations, and that Valinor has psychological healing attributes which I think the orcs are, of all Arda's peoples, most in need of."

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Do you anticipate any problems from my perspective with implementing that plan?

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Moving the Elves will cause political instability internal to the Elves which is hard to predict but unlikely to kill anyone and vanishingly unlikely to kill more than seven people. Elves outside Valinor eventually fade. You could ask me to change that about them.

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Promise relays this to Maedhros.

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Maedhros' expression quirks at the 'seven people'. "The Silmarils prevent Elves from fading but if he can do it that'd be great."

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"Does it matter very much where on the continent the Elves go?"

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"Cuivienen would be the natural place to put them. But no."

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Arrange that Elves will not fade. As described and without extraneous side effects I seem likely to find inconvenient translocate orcs to comfortable parts of Valinor and Elves to comfortable places on this continent.

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Done. Dead orcs and Elves alike are still in the Halls of Mandos.

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"Any strong reason to be really selective about bringing people out of the Halls of Mandos?"

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"I can think of a few specific cases, though we could probably mediate them by means less complicated than death. Oh. Tell Eru to change marriages. My grandmother is in the Halls of Mandos forever because her husband remarried and it was impermissible for a man to have two living wives."

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"Is there any reason for that? No, nevermind, I can just ask him -" Is there any reason for that.
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They are supposed to bond to one partner for the lifetime of Arda. When it works it is tremendously meaningful and a source of happiness and security.

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Is there any good reason for imposing it on everyone?

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I suppose it could definitely be optional.

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Who let this guy design a universe? Promise might be glad of the opportunity even if it had taken Sauron longer to fuck up. "He doesn't have a good reason. Revised design opinions?"

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"We can still swear oaths. People can swear marriage oaths if it makes them personally happy, but it shouldn't happen automatically - and, come to think of it, any people should be able to -"

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"Any people?"

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"Marriage oaths are between a man and a woman," he says. "I'm really just tampering for personal amusement here but it doesn't seem like they'd necessarily have to be."

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Blink. Blink. "Wow," she says. "Who let this guy design a universe? Okay, I can throw that in." Arrange for marriage oaths to be optional - retroactively from now, if desired by the involved parties - and permit them between any interested parties whose existing spouses do not object.

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Done.

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Thank you for being so indifferent about this, by the way. "Anything else that should happen before clearing out Mandos?"

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"Swanships of Alqualondë. Powerful magical - well, ships - that were the one-time creation of a people, were destroyed, and if I understand it cannot be made again because of their nature."

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"What does it even mean to have a thing that can only be made once because of its nature?"

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"I'm not Eru, but luckily you have him on the line."

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"He's surprisingly cooperative, even." What's the deal with the swanships?

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They were destroyed. It was one of the great tragedies of the Age.

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Why couldn't they be remade?

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They were the sort of work that can only be made once.

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Why is there such a thing as a work that can only be made once? Maybe there's a reason but maybe it's more "who let this guy design a universe".

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It makes its destruction more tragic.

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"Who in the fuck let this guy design a universe," she mutters. Can you put them back?

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I do not functionally have limitations.

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Great. Put them back.

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I have done so. I do not think that will be satisfactory to you.

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Why?

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They were created in Valinor, so are now back in Valinor, but their owners have been relocated to a beautiful beach on this continent.

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Well, put the boats by the beach with the owners.

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I would have done that originally but you said to put them back, so I put them back. Fairy orders are very terrible world-design, you know.

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If I ever find someone who designed them I will take it up with that person at that time. Can you make me immune to receipt of orders?

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I could do that. You sensibly made Maitimo not part of the system that operated on orders; making someone immune only to receiving them permits much more abuse.

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Yes, I'm aware, but I might need the mechanism and I'm not sure if Fairyland itself is part of your jurisdiction. If it turns out to be I may abolish the system altogether later, but for now. Make me immune to the receipt of orders.

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Silence.

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Did you do it?

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Unless the mechanics of fairy orders escape me, one that is given is bound to be carried out.

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You'd been in the habit of confirming things. Is it just that you didn't like this one?

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I disliked it, considered it unwise, and was alarmed by what your decision to give it after barely any time to discuss those concerns said about you. I can move many hundreds of thousands of times faster than you, and had much more time to consider it, and still have little confidence it was wisely done; you told Maedhros once that ordering forces far beyond your comprehension was unwise, and it remains so when the forces are favorably inclined. And now I have less latitude to protect you from yourself, or my world from the unintended consequences of your decisions.

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Did you have an alternate suggestion to reliably keep other people from using fairy orders on, most pertinently, you, at one remove without prematurely sacrificing my ability to edit the universe?

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Make you immune to undesired or non-consented-to fairy orders, most obviously, or make it impossible for people to order others through you, or changing the recency rule on you so you can pick a satisfactory bedrock of orders and not have them overridden, or other things that didn't involve rewriting a great deal of your fundamental nature. And no, I can't put it back; you're not of my universe and moving this many things this quickly without any destabilizing and undesired side effects is at least as hard as raising a continent without causing tidal waves and a rise in sea level.

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In the future if I suggest something you cannot undo please mention that.
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I cannot undo most of what you've asked. I cannot put an oath in force again. I cannot kill the people I've brought back to life; I can tell the Valar I've reversed my instructions regarding who should be in Valinor, and I cam move the people around, but that'll be 'doing it again' not undoing it, and will be destabilizing. The swanships destabilized the whole timeline.

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The timeline?

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I can alter all of Arda's history, not just this specific moment of it. Lots of your changes propagate forwards; some of them also propagate backwards. Now the swanships are not the sort of thing that could only be made once.

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She rubs her eye. "...I think I should maybe sleep before I tell him to do anything else."

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"All right. Good night."

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"I'm probably awake enough to do things less complicated than that, if the ex-prisoners need anything...?" She looks at them.

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Some of them fled as soon as the orcs all vanished. Some of them are still there, not moving, staring blankly ahead. "Leave that to me?" Maedhros says.

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"Yeah, okay. I'll go find a nice bit of roof to sleep on, it's vaguely horrible in here."

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He nods fervently.

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She sighs. She goes and finds some roof that is less vaguely horrible. She sleeps.

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The sun rises. Maedhros and most of the prisoners are out in the ashy, rocky valley in front of Angband.

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She flies down to see what's going on.

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Nothing much is going on. They are all kind of just sitting there.

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"...Are things okay?" she asks Maedhros.

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"Yes," he says. "Do you need to eat? What do you want to do today?"

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"I should eat something," she agrees. "You don't have to feed me anymore, although I'm not sure where to find food around here, maybe the orcs had something. I want to figure out what I need to know to sensibly address the dead people thing."

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"When Elves and orcs' bodies are damaged beyond our capacity to repair them, we leave them. We can at that time, if we choose, go to the Halls of Mandos, or we can just sort of drift. You lose yourself, if you choose to just drift. In the Halls of Mandos, Námo, who is a Vala, tries to rehabilitate you and when he thinks the time is right return you to a body. People who he disapproves of don't tend to get to come back. I think it's better to bring everyone back, personally, and then resolve problems of antisocial behavior in some less dramatic way, but it will certainly cause political upheaval. I know nothing about orc social structures or what happens if you bring orc dead back to life."

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Nod. "I made something that may have been a mistake yesterday so I'm going to have to be more careful, it might take me a while to tease out all the implications."

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"The dead have been dead a long time."

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"Thank you for your help, by the way."

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"I have been fantasizing about this for a very long time. I apologize for not figuring out how to make it happen sooner and at a lower cost to you."

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"It's not your fault."

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"Pretty obviously is. Could have done this the first day, if I'd known what I was doing."

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"Okay, well, I don't blame you."

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"I knew, the first day, too. I was just - so tired of hoping. I appreciate that you don't blame me but it really would be a reasonable thing to do."

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"I'll be okay," she says.

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"Yeah, you will. That doesn't have much to do with it. What are your goals with the dead?"

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"Well, being dead - and judged, by standards I am skeptical of - sounds bad and like it should stop, but I don't actually know where to put anybody. Or if the place can even sustain everyone; this is really densely populated compared to Fairyland."

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"I don't know how many dead orcs there are. The place did sustain all of the Elves who are currently dead without many problems back when we were alive."

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"And Eru is unimpressed with me about immunizing myself to orders and don't know how much I can rely on him for nonhostile commentary on things any more."

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"Eru works on - narratives. The clever person outsmarting the evil monster to get the power to call on God in a moment of great need - good story. Gives you a lot of latitude. I expect he was inevitably going to stop regarding getting ordered around as a beautiful story."

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"...Huh. That puts some things in context."

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He shrugs. "I still think our creator's less evil than yours."

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"I'm still not sure we have one."

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"How else would your world have come about?"

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"I'm not sure. Maybe I should ask Eru how he came about."

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"That would be interesting."

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"Or maybe Fairyland didn't come about, maybe it's just always been."

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"There are worlds I could believe that of. Not yours. A world wouldn't run on rules intelligible to people if they were features of physical law. Someone made Fairyland."

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"What about the other mortal world?"

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"I don't know anything about it. It only has Men? Magic doesn't work there?"

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"Yeah. If Men are the same thing, which they do look to be."

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"Men are very ill-designed. I'm tempted to ask Eru what he was thinking, while we have him. A world of only Men would not to my eye demand a creator. Elves yes."

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"Where would the Men come from, though? Even if they aren't very well-designed?"

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"Accidental transport like yours, from some world that they were designed for?" He shrugs.

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"By that logic a world could have Elves and be undesigned as long as they were from here originally."

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"Elves are bound to Arda."

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"Is that the same thing as fading outside Valinor or will I have to look into it separately?"

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"Separate. I don't know what it entails in terms of experiences we have, just that just like you knew when you were born you couldn't die, we know we're bound to Arda."

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"Started. We don't say 'born'."

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"We say 'awakened', for the ones who came into being fully grown. That's another complication of returning the dead, incidentally - some of them have been dead a long time."

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"Do they get used to it or something, or is it just they'll have missed a lot?"

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"They do get used to it. It's supposed to be a difficult adjustment. There are complications from them having missed a lot, like that they may not be used to the Sun and the Moon and no one will speak their language, but it's mostly the adjustment."

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"Any ideas?"

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"Lórien has a big peaceful garden where the dead get brought back. It's - a little dreamlike, all you have to do is think about how you'd like things to be and they'll change. I think that was a pretty good system. Lórien also has them all brought back separately, with one person who they remember and who can help them readjust. I don't know if that's the best system but I'm disinclined to experiment, there's too much interpersonal variation and success is too hard to measure to expect that to result in a noticeably better one."

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"Where's the garden?"

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"Valinor. So you can use the original for dead orcs, which there are a lot more of, and design something similar for dead Elves."

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Nod.

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"Something on your mind?"

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"Not super looking forward to my next conversation with Eru, especially if I have to do something complicated like design a garden."

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"I'm sorry. Hmm." You could ask him to answer the pleas of his children for the healing of their world, and then feel out whether that gets him into a more cooperative mood - he may still be able to hear us like this, incidentally, I have no idea - and then let me do the requests. Since I gather that cooperativeness is a bigger factor in success here than airtight wording.

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That might work. I'm also going to apologize for being too hasty about the immunizing me thing, I don't know if that's the kind of thing that helps.

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It seems likely.

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Thank you for all your help.

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The people we're figuring out how to bring back gave their lives for me. I owe it to them to do this right.

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Well, thank you anyway.

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My surviving brothers should be here by mid-afternoon.

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Should I wait for them before I address Eru again?

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I can't think why. I suppose it does not matter now but I gave a number of people your name, I was hoping that at least one of us could get in osanwë-range of Angband undetected.

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Doesn't matter now, wasn't using my capacity for direct harm for anything, but thank you for warning me anyway.

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They are all very relieved it wasn't needed.

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Yeah.

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I waited alone for Thauron to deliver the Silmarils. I am sure he was supposed to kill us afterwards but I thought he'd be tempted not to.

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The first thing I tried was actually tricking them into thinking I'd be more useful if they obliterated my body, but they didn't get around to trying it.

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You think that'd send you home?

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It might. I don't know. It was worth a try. I wasn't expecting Sauron to be so impatient and clumsy.

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A smile. The Ainur handle surprises very badly.

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Anyway, I'm going to go see what I can find in the way of breakfast from what the orcs left behind, do you or they want anything?

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We all prefer not to eat, for now.

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Okay.

So she goes looking for food.
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Orcs don't eat much that's plant-based. A lot of insects, and bread made from ground insects and things in that vein.

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...she picks at it curiously, but she's not a fan. Alas. How far out would she have to go to try random wild leaves and stuff?

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Everything within a hundred miles of Angband is inconveniently dead. Maedhros says his brothers can bring her leaves if she likes.

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Leaves, berries, whatever, as long as it's chewable and a plant.

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On its way.

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Okay then. She doesn't think she's too incapacitatingly hungry to talk to Eru.

I'm sorry about being incautious with the immunization yesterday. It was clumsy and I should know better.
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You couldn't have known better, just listened better. But he sounds less grouchy.

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I mean, I should have known to listen better. What do you think of Maedhros's idea of spreading out the requests so it's not all going straight through me?

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Most people would make even more mistakes than you if granted the power to have all their wishes come true. Maedhros might not but only because all his wishes are for other people.

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Is there a specific class of mistakes you anticipate?

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There are several thousand people who'd wish Maedhros and his brothers dead, and sincerely not be happy in a world in which they walked free. I am not sure their death is the wrong outcome but wishes are certainly the wrong process. There are many people who'd wish for another to love them. I can do that. I shouldn't. There are people who'd wish themselves different, and not always wisely, or wish for power they do not have the knowledge to wield safely. There are people who'd wish things like "Give me every book in the world on this table" and then there'd be a black hole.

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What's a black hole?
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That would be even more difficult to explain in terms you could understand than everything else I am saying.

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Oh.

There's a thing some people do where instead of enforcing all their orders they enforce one to obey future orders, and more qualifiers can be arranged that way, like, 'if there is a reason I'm not aware of not to do this, instead of carrying out the instruction tell me what that is', but doing that properly requires more finesse with not using imperatives in conversation than I have.
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Fairy orders are not a good system.


A few of your requests could have created a black hole if I'd been at all inclined to do that, or if you'd been slightly more careless, but I do not want any black holes.
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I was leaning kind of heavily on 'help' obliging helpful interpretations of any orders that could be carried out helpfully. I was not in very good condition to be trying to do as much in a row as I did.

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Black holes can be very helpful. They are for example one solution to Melkor and Sauron being indestructible. And they are very pretty, though probably not to your unaided vision.

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I could explain them to you but I estimate it would take about eight hours for you to have an understanding more meaningful than the one that popped instantly to mind on hearing the word 'black hole'.

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I can put that off. What did you mean when you said you were without functional limitations, when it then turned out you couldn't undo some things?

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I could undo things in the sense of going back to the place in the timeline where I hadn't done them, but then you'd order me to do them again. I could go back to that place in the timeline and not let you order me, or something, but doing that erases all the experiences that anyone has had since that moment. I could undo things in the sense of doing an action that results in things being almost the way they were before - swap all the orcs and Elves' continents again, for example - but doing things that complicated without undesired side effects is really really hard and doing it this frequently makes those side effects likelier to be things that you object to, which I'm currently ordered not to let happen.

And you are not of this world at all and not my jurisdiction so doing things with you is completely different.
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...what do I need to know about how the timeline works?

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It shows everything that happens at every moment in all of Arda's history. I can intervene to change any thing at any moment; I exist outside time. Your orders seem to only prescribe future actions, but perhaps that's because you didn't know I can also change past actions? I told you I was doing that with the swanships. They were the sort of thing that can only be made once, and I needed to remake them, so I changed the aspect of their original making that made them impossible to ever make again.

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What would have happened if you'd been under orders not to lie to me when you told me they were the sort of thing that was impossible to make again?

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I wasn't lying. They were that sort of thing. I changed them to never have been that sort of thing.

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...but then they never had been that sort of thing.

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I should probably have version control for this universe.

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...what's that?

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A way of restoring it to previous states without undoing things. It would make it easier to describe to you exactly what I did when I changed the swanships. Not easy, but easier.

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I don't get it.
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A sigh. It would probably take four hours for me to explain it to you in a way that provided more understanding than the first explanation I gave.

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Does that seem like a good use of the next four hours?

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If you are going to be meddling with timelines, yes, probably. I highly recommend not meddling with timelines.

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Are there things that I am likely to care about more than the ships that involve messing with timelines?

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Do you have preferences about suffering that occurred in the past? If so, you might be tempted to change the universe so orcs were never in pain, for example. I think this is deeply unwise.

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Why is that deeply unwise?

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It would affect a lot of other things. Plausibly enough of them that it doesn't make sense for this conversation to be happening.

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That does sound pretty unwise. I am unhappy that the orcs spent that long suffering all the time but not enough to try messing with - time travel.
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I think this is the best course of action.

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Why'd you design the universe the way it is?

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It is a beautiful story.

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I have other worlds that are happier. Should I just - fill the universe with copies of those?

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Well, Promise says, I think you should strongly consider options that don't involve anyone being set on fire or raped, but maybe if you did that there would be black holes or something.

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There are worlds like that. The question is just whether I should copy them instead of also having other worlds.

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I assume it would take you hours to explain why you did it this way.

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The short version is that I did it every way.

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I would be surprised in light of remarks you have made to hear that you did it the way of, say, Fairyland.

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Well, no. Fairyland is much worse than this. I didn't do it any blatantly evil ways.

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I suppose we have different sensibilities.

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I suppose we do!

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This world will have on balance far more happy free people than ones under orders from anyone, and even most orcs prefer to be alive.

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And lots of fairies live for millennia without getting caught by anybody and most vassals wouldn't seek the ability to die, what's your point?

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And innocents who wander into fairyland?

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I was trying to get one home when Thorn got us, I could have done it given a little more time. They're not inevitably trapped.

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Where is that one now?

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Probably dead. It was a long time ago as mortals age. I don't think Thorn wanted to keep her around long term and doubt he bothered to de-age her.

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I do not have unlimited power over Fairyland.

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I figured.

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Silence.

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How objectionable do you find the general sentiment underlying my revisions, when I'm not being hopelessly clumsy about it?

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Joy and triumph snatched from the jaws of tragedy, the lessons of ages finally acted on in a momentous time of healing - that's good. Acquiring absolute personal power is understandable but much more objectionable by my lights.

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Man, this guy. Well, I'm trying not to be petty about it.

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It would be wise to surrender it as soon as the tasks ahead of you are surmountable with less dangerous methods and better-understood resources. If I had your assurance you would do this, I would hesitate less to aid you in the healing of the world.

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...It sounds like you have other universes that could use healing too, she points. So that might be a long time.

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Silence.

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Some people just write down stories. On paper. Instead of using other people to make them.

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Silence.

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Not a fan of this prospect?

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I am not going to cooperate in teaching you to behave less disastrously if that's going to embolden you to tamper with other worlds. You will make a mistake that gets you vanquished from my world eventually.

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Oh dear.

Well, that could've gone better.

Are people here with food yet?
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People are here with food. They're talking with Maedhros. There is no hugging, just a lot of standing in relative proximity.

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She takes the food and does not have to be hand-fed and that is nice.

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People kind of stare, awestruck, when Maedhros explains that Eru has immunized them to fairy orders. "Do you believe that?" Maglor asks dubiously.

"No, but I'm enjoying it," Maedhros says. "And - the oath did change, I can feel it."
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"...Why would I make that up?" Promise asks.

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"I don't think you did, I think Sauron did and none of this is really happening," he says as if this is perfectly obvious.

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"Oh."

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"He's done that kind of thing to me before." He smiles at her. "It doesn't really matter. At this moment I am not in pain, and that is very nice."

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"Yeah." Sigh. "So, Eru and I have a bit of an impasse. He likes the story 'somebody shows up, gains supreme power, fixes the world's major flaws, gives up supreme power and moves on from there'. He does not like the story where instead I consider all his other universe projects my business and will be uncooperative until I screw up if he thinks I'm going to go see who's getting set on fire there."
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"With all due respect, why did you tell him you planned to do that before you finished fixing this world and learning how he works?"

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"That was probably a mistake. Which I suppose is evidence in favor that I should not attempt to rely on any plans in which I do not make mistakes, dicey in the best of situations. Although I'm not sure how long anybody could talk to me without guessing I might want to do that."

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"Being a little bit harder to guess is a useful skill to cultivate," he says. "If I'd known you had Eru's name I'd have tried nudging you towards different lessons.

I hear ordering hostile vassals is a bad way to get what you want."
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"It can be done. But - yeah, I don't really have practice, just - observation."

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"It wouldn't really be a victory for the people of this world - at least, some of them who I know - to be restored to life but knowing now that there are other worlds still suffering, other worlds with the griefs ours has now overcome, and nothing we can do about it. And my family isn't really going to be popular here. Perhaps you could suggest to Eru that part of a happy ending for this world involves putting all its malcontents on other ones where they can redeem themselves." We don't actually need Eru for cosmic power, we just need a few uninterrupted Ages.

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"Huh. Maybe that would help." And if I can get to Fairyland I can gate wherever I want as long as I know what it looks like.

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Yep. It's worth the time, if it ends with us wielding things we understand.

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Sounds like fun. ...It is really hard to put even intractable cosmic power down.

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I have known a lot of ambitious people. The most successful ones have the ambition "get stronger", not "take over the universe", right up until they're strong enough to do it. Overreaching yourself is a very easy mistake to make.

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Thanks.
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Hold that wisdom rather dear; I certainly paid enough for it.

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Okay.

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His brothers are staring at them. "So," Maglor says, "will Eru bring back the dead?"

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"Um, discussion pending. Probably."

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"Thank you," he says sincerely. "We've missed them."

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"I'm glad to help."

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"Sorry we didn't get here faster."

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"It's okay."

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"Apparently. Congratulations."

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"Thanks."

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"We're going to take these people south and get started on building them shelter, if that's all right with you."

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"...That's fine, you don't need my permission. Can I come along?"

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"Of course. Are we just...leaving Sauron and Morgoth standing there?"

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"I'm open to other suggestions for what else to do with them."

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"Personally," says Maglor, "I think Eru should cast them both into the Everlasting Darkness."

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"That sounds less pleasant and not materially less dangerous than just having them stand there and I don't even know what the Everlasting Darkness is."
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"Forgive me if I don't understand how orders work, but couldn't any fairy who falls in like you did release them?"

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"No, they'd have to have their names or feed them, but these are admittedly not insurmountable barriers. What's the Everlasting Darkness?"

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"It's behind the Gates of Night, which are in Valinor, but I think only metaphorically. The point is that things which have physical form can't exist there, so fairies couldn't get in to change anything."

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"I guess that's a selling point, but what's it like there."

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"Dark. Things which have physical form can't exist there, and light has physical form."

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"That sounds really boring."
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"Standing in one place is also really boring, and far more dangerous."

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"Yeah, I suppose you have a point. I wish I could just turn them into sparrows or something but I couldn't even if sorcery worked here."

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"Eru probably could, but I don't think that's safe. Sparrows with mind-reading and communicative powers and hostile intent are still not safe."

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"Well, the way sorcery does it somebody who's been turned into a sparrow loses a lot of things that shouldn't strictly depend on whether or not you're a sparrow, but I suppose I can't assume mindreading would be covered."

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"Also, the Valar are not much like mortals or fairies and might react differently to being turned into a sparrow. And at least they'll have each other."

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"I'll ask Eru about it."

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Maglor's expression twitches. "Yes, I suppose you will." And they start walking south.

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She flies.

I got kind of carried away, she tells Eru, but it's a bad idea for several reasons to go on a universe-revising streak with a hostile vassal, even if you weren't as incomprehensibly powerful as you are, and anyway I do object by default to slave labor and shouldn't get used to having it. - Um, I'm worried that if I actually rescind all your orders after I'm done with the major problems of this world it will have time travel effects but I could say you can act freely or something.
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I commend your wisdom.

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The remaining things that I might need you for would be doing something intelligent with the dead people, and Melkor and Sauron, and maybe Maedhros not wanting to exist if he doesn't, um, perk up without the oath and stuff. Am I forgetting anything? Can we cooperate on those things?

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You might also care about means to return to Fairyland, though there may be people in this world who would develop such means in enough time without me. We can cooperate on those things.

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You said Celebrimbor and Sauron could do it; Maedhros thinks his father could too, is he right?

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Yes.

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You could probably do it faster but I'm not in that much of a hurry, especially now that I can safely eat here. Anything else?

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You would probably desire that I reverse the Doom of the Noldor.

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What's the Doom of the Noldor?
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When the Noldor committed crimes in the Blessed Realm, the Valar doomed them to know torment, grief, and death on these shores, and to wane and become as shadows of regret, and to languish long in Mandos even after all their victims had forgiven them.

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She's gonna guess Eru thinks it's a pretty story. That does sound like the sort of thing I would like reversed.

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I have asked the Valar to pardon them.

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...and that'll do the trick by itself?

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Yes. The House of Fëanor will be more of a problem.

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Why?

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A pardon for the crime for which the Noldor were doomed does not stretch to pardon for the crimes they have committed since, most of which in any event are not mine or the Valar's to forgive.

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Meaning?

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They still have a long list of atrocities to answer for. Those do not have metaphysical effects but I would not characterize the problem as solved to your satisfaction.

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If they don't have metaphysical effects I'm not sure the problem is one best handled with your help.

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Fair enough.

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"Eru undid the Doom of the Noldor," Promise reports. "I didn't even have to tell him to."

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Smiles flash across all of their faces. Briefly.

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I assume you heard that they think you should put Melkor and Sauron in Everlasting Darkness?

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I could do that. A black hole might be more thematically appropriate.

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Didn't you not want any black holes?

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Oh, not here! Several hundred billion miles from here.

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Black holes are fine to have at that distance?
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If they're very small ones. We could do several hundred quadrillion miles and then have it be a nice big one.

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And Melkor and Sauron wouldn't be able to hurt anybody if put in a black hole?

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They would not.

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"Eru thinks a 'black hole' several hundred billion or possibly several hundred quadrillion miles away from here might be more thematically appropriate than Everlasting Darkness and says that Melkor and Sauron wouldn't be able to hurt anybody from there," she reports.

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They look at each other. "I am not qualified to evaluate that claim," Maedhros says.

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"Well, neither am I, he said yesterday it would take eight hours to improve my understanding of the idea of a black hole beyond what the phrase suggests."

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"How long would it take to improve mine?"

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Would Maedhros have an easier time understanding black holes than me?

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He has more of the prerequisite knowledge, but it would still take him a long time. It would take his father around three minutes.

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"Apparently it would take you a long time even though you have more of the prerequisite knowledge than me but your father would take around three minutes. Your father sounds like a really interesting person."
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"That he is. I hope you two get along."

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"Me too. So I guess the options are address dead people first and evil people standing still in Angband second so as to get an opinion on black holes or just go with Eru thinking it's thematically appropriate and secure."

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"Let's do dead people first. They can stand in Angband a while longer."

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"Okay. Input on dead people?"

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"Can he bring everyone back near whoever they'd most benefit from being around, including if that means they're better off alone? Seems easier than sorting for 'not near people they'll immediately try to murder' manually, and seems like the best thing for the orcs not knowing anything about their social circles."

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"That sounds like a really elegant algorithm to me." What do you think?

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I can do this but in the short term it will probably cause Maedhros some distress.

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...Why?

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Because the set of people who'd benefit from being near him is not known to all members of that set.

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Could you rephrase that?
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Imagine there were two people who would like to wake up at his side, A and B. A does not know that B is sufficiently important to Maedhros that 'at Maedhros's side' is the right place for B to wake up, and will probably be angry to learn of it.

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Oh.

Promise relays this. "And I assume there are probably similar cases for other people but yours is the one he mentioned."
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There are many such cases but most of the Eldar are less inclined to interpersonal violence than Maedhros' family.

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Promise relays that too.

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Maedhros has stopped having facial expressions. His brothers are staring at him a bit alarmedly. "I think Eru is wrong," he says, "about what is good for people. This is a problem with your plan to let him decide it."

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"What do you want me to do, interview every dead person and decide myself who it would be good for them to wake up near, this was your idea in the first place."

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"Yes but since then I've gotten the additional information that Eru is a bad judge of something I was trusting him to be judging."

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"Okay, do you have a different idea, then?"

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"Can he just do 'the dead come back in the place where they'll thrive best'? That covers cases where people'd end up awkwardly near each other."

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"Then how's he supposed to decide between your A and B?"

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"Clearly they won't thrive best next to each other, right?"

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"Presumably, but how should he pick which one to give you and which one to put in a second-best location which is technically not where they'd thrive best if only they got first pick?"

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"We need my father to get out of here. Everyone else can go be with their fathers."

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I think I am sort of handicapped in understanding the problem here.

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The problem is that if my boyfriend and my father both show up here they'll probably fight, and if my boyfriend's also supposed to be near his father then they will definitely and spectacularly fight.

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Okay, so do you want - the original plan with a specific exception putting your boyfriend somewhere away from you, or...
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There are probably lots of instances of the same problem. Go for the original plan with an exception in cases where violence would be expected.

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Maedhros suggests that there be an exception where somebody gets a second-best option if violence would otherwise be expected, Promise tells Eru.

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Okay.



Done.
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Promise looks around.

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There are suddenly ten people present, squinting uncomfortably in the sunlight. Maedhros looks exasperated.

"Hello, everyone," he says. "We won. Welcome back."
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Promise waves shyly.

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"This is Promise. She - uh, she can give people orders, if she knows their names - Promise, please don't give any of these people orders - and she knows Eru's name so she's just - straightening out the universe.


Do they tell you, in the Halls of Mandos, what's happening out here, do you know what we did -"
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"I wasn't planning to," Promise assures him.

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One of the men present seems to have recovered more quickly than the others. He looks at her, sharply, when she speaks. "Can you say that again?"

There's something of a faint smile on the faces of the surviving Feanorian brothers.
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"...I wasn't planning to?"

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"What are you doing?"

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"Hovering?"
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"He's interested in the way you speak," Maedhros says. "I didn't think he'd notice that fast. What language are you perceiving her as speaking?"

"At first it sounded as if she were speaking Quenya, but that didn't make sense, Quenya would have evolved over the last five hundred years and wouldn't sound that way spoken here today and when I tried thinking about which sounds I'd heard they were definitely all standard, like it was some smoothed over average of the language, and I tried to think what she should have sounded like and then the second time it sounded like that..."
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"Oh, fairies don't actually speak languages, we just talk."

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"You produce sounds. What sounds? How do you decide what sounds, or do you not have conscious control over it? Will all listeners hear the same sounds?"

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"...I'm not sure how you want the sounds described. I'm not making them at random, but if I make the wrong ones they will not be the words I had in mind, and usually when I'm making sounds I have words in mind. I don't have a clue what I sound like to you but I assume if somebody who didn't share any languages with you were here it would sound different because everybody would understand me."

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"And if I used a recording device? Macalaurë, did you ever get around to inventing a sufficiently high-fidelity recording device? I require one immediately."

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Blink. Blink. "I can also sing chords," she volunteers.

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"Yes, obviously, since there are tonal languages. Where are you from? Do you know other people who communicate in the same manner? Do you perceive the way we communicate as being the same as they way you do it? If I think about this enough and stop having expectations about what I'll hear, will I cease to be able to understand you?"

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"Fairies in general all use plain speech like me. Fairyland's full of us. I hear you're supposed to be able to make me a gate there. I probably wouldn't notice if you switched languages but I can hear the sounds you're using if I think about it, I had to do that a lot to use magic songs. And I have never heard of that happening but my default expectation is that you'll be able to understand me whatever you do."

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"Why do you call it 'plain speech'? It apparently involves making a number of simultaneous different sounds that are calibrated to the listeners, which you can't even know, or else making the sounds that would convey your thoughts in all possible languages.

If I switch languages to one with better technical vocabulary for a technical conversation, will I start hearing your responses in that one?

If I invent a language that doesn't use the vocal chords, uses entirely non-vocal sound production, what happens?"

Everyone else is still blinking confusedly in the light.
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"I think it's called that because it's just speech instead of encoded speech like everybody else uses. I have no idea what I sound like to you, let alone what I'd sound like if you switched codes. No idea."

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"Father," Maedhros says, "Eru thinks he can explain black holes to you in three minutes. We can start working on a recording device for Promise after we've disposed of Moringotho and Thauron."

"Tell Eru he can wait a moment, did you at least run the obvious experiments? What does an observer who has been told to expect to hear Thindarin hear? What does an observer who has been told to expect a foreign language hear? If everyone present speaks only one language, does she still do the chords? If everyone present speaks only one language but there's someone within earshot who speaks a different one? Could she determine what language she's being heard as, once she knows how to identify them?"

There are a lot of complicated emotions on Maedhros' face. "We did not think of those obvious experiments, because you were dead. Perhaps after we've disposed of Moringotto and Thauron?"

"This is way, way more important than Moringotho and Thauron," Fëanor says, "whoever did this had a kind of magic I don't yet understand. Fairies are probably more powerful than -"

"Than Eru," Maedhros says, "which is why she's ordering him around and he can explain black holes to you -"

"Oh, all right."

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Promise giggles. Um, I think he's willing to listen to a black holes explanation now.

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Fëanor goes suddenly still. This allows everyone else to get a word in edgewise.

Everyone else is, apparently a red-haired man who looks exactly like one of Maedhros' surviving brothers, lurches into his arms, and goes very still; a blond man who says to Maedhros. 'Well. Don't know how you pulled that one out, but well done.' and then looks around like this is not in fact the place where he would have wanted to wake up, and several more men who are glaring at each other.

"That's Eru's fault," Maedhros says to the latter group, "Findekáno, I told him to put you with your family and I have no idea why he insisted -"

"Probably because no one else," Findekáno says, "would yell at you enough for whatever the fuck you were thinking in Doriath, you should have dismissed everyone under your command after the Nirnaeth, how could you-"

This has the other people even tenser. Maedhros raises a hand, as if to hold them in place. It's shaking.

"I know," he says, "but Eru was supposed to put the dead where's best for them, not where they're needed by the living -"

"It is definitely best for me to be here, Maitimo, why do you think I keep on chasing you down, no matter what you've done since we last met, no matter how hard you try to kill me -"

Maedhros flinches.

"I meant that in the sense 'you can't actually avoid me for my own good', not 'the Nirnaeth was an instance of you trying to kill me', obviously we both made the same error of optimism there..."

"How on earth is it good for you to be here with me?"

"Well," he says, "what are they doing with you now?"

"I don't know. They were talking about a war crimes trial, or another exile -"

"Then I don't have much time, do I? And we wasted so much of it-"

Fëanor blinks. "I'd insist on more than a few hundred quadrillion miles," he says to Promise, "the universe is apparently very big and that's actually pretty close, light travels that distance in only a few years. A black hole is a satisfactory means of disposing of our Enemy. Findekáno, why are you here?"
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Um, you heard the guy who understands black holes now, says Promise, unequipped to comment on the family drama or the boyfriend.
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Are you sure you don't want anything else with them first?

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"Are we sure we don't want anything else with Melkor and Sauron before flinging them into a black hole?"

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"Why did 'Sauron' come across that way when I'd expect you to have said it correctly?" Fëanor says.

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"Uh, I know his real name but fairies have a thing about abiding by chosen nicknames."
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"So did you specifically choose to make the sounds of the phonemes in 'Sauron'? Because it's a name? Is it even his chosen name?"

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"Well, I don't know, he didn't exactly clarify, but it seemed likely from context."

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"So names you process normally: you learn a collection of sounds, and then you produce specifically those sounds and your listeners hear them as specifically those sounds. I speak the name of a flower, or a concept, or a movement, the way you speak the name of a person. But to you, flowers and concepts and movements have no names?"

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"...they have words..."

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"But not the kind of word that 'Sauron' is to you. 'Sauron' is a word that every hearer will hear the same way. Is that because it's a name?"

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"Probably? Names are different. But it's not his real name, so I'm not sure."

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"Do you consciously do something different when you say 'Sauron did that' compared to if you say 'a bad person did that'? Is it all proper nouns? What's the name of the fortress behind us?"

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"I think it was called Angband? And of course it's different, one of them is a specific bad person and one of them is an indefinite one, there are more bad people than just him - do you mean with my voice? I'm not paying conscious attention to how I say stuff, not like that."

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He hears 'Angamaite' when she says 'Angband'. "So it's really just names of people. The magic that powers your translation ability distinguishes that specifically. Weird. How about names of animals?"

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"Fairyland doesn't even have animals."

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"So if I say to you that my son once had a pet velociraptor named Ambalë, and you say it back to me while I'm expecting to hear you speak Thindarin-"

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"...Your son once had a pet velociraptor named Ambalë."

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"Animal names retain the original language too. What about people who have names in multiple languages - my sons, what are their names?"

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Blink. "I haven't been introduced to most of them. Uh, I told Maedhros once it was safe to introduce himself to fairies that way because it didn't overlap his real name which is Maitimo?" It clicked when Sauron said it.

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"Maedhros is you?" Fëanor says to his eldest son. "That's not a responsible translation. ...so names you parse normally, and they're heard exactly as you said them, and you say them exactly as you initially heard them, just like everyone else does for all words. Everything else, the superposition of sounds. Which we'll run tests on later once you've deposited our foes in a black hole and - hmm, there's a lot else to do. If we go to Eru's other projects via travel through the stars it'll take us a very long time...how do I build you a gate back to Fairyland? How are gates generally built?"

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"Gates are generally built with sorcery. It doesn't work outside Fairyland. So I have no idea how you're going to do it. Are we sure we don't want Melkor and Sauron for anything? I think the black hole is a one way trip."

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"Moringotho and Thauron are very powerful and under your control and it is tempting to exploit that but we don't need to, if you've had them release everyone sworn to them and tell you everything you might want to know already. Are the Silmarils still in Angamaite?"

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"I didn't actually shake them down for information. I don't know where the Silmarils are right now but probably in there somewhere."

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"Might want to do that, then," he says. "If Angamaite's unoccupied we can head in there right now -"

"We'll stay out here," Maedhros says.

"If you like," says his father. "Well done, by the way."

"It was all Promise."
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"It's unoccupied except for the two of them who are both holding quite still."

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"I'd like to talk with them," he says, "if you don't mind and think it's comparatively safe. The Valar and Maiar know a lot of things we'd otherwise take a very long time to learn, and while we are not pressed for time I understand it that there are still griefs elsewhere in the galaxy, and evils in your home world." He starts walking. Everyone except Maedhros and Fingon follow him.

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Promise glances over her shoulder at them, but follows the party to the fortress. "If all I let them do is talk it's safe, I'm pretty sure I won't screw that up."

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He nods. "Aside from having an amazingly complicated language and magical language-parsing mechanism with specific exceptions for words used as referents for specific people, how do fairies work?"

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"Um, we're more immortal than you are - although I don't know all the details because I've never been reduced to parts too small to eventually regenerate or known anyone who was - and most kinds begin spontaneously but there are some breeding kinds, and every kind has its own innate magic and other properties, and we're all winged humanoids?"

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He nods. "Innate magic? What's that like? Can you learn the magics associated with other kinds?"

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"No, sorcery's learnable but kind magic isn't. My kind is leaflets and leaflets are each immune to one kind of sorcery; my name can't be learned by sorcery but another leaflet might be immune to being turned into an animal or something. And it isn't very useful in my case since mental sorcery is hopelessly obscure anyway and not a prominent way to get a name. I also have a tree which has special properties, but that's more a property of the tree than me."

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"What ways of getting names are there? How would I be able to recognize another leaflet?"

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"Conventional ways are being told by the fairy belonging to the name for whatever reason, or someone else who has the name, or being the Queen. The Queen is a one-of-a-kind fairy whose kind magic is knowing all other fairies' names. Leaflets are all female, all close to my height, all have leaf wings but it can be whatever kind of leaf, and when we haven't recently been set on fire and raided orc wardrobes we tend to be found in outfits made of leaves. Coloration and such might differ but no leaflets are going to glow in the dark or have antlers or anything."

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"Glow in the dark?"

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"Glowgolds glow, most strikingly in the dark. That's not their kind magic, they just glow."

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"But doesn't everyone?"

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"No?"
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"By glow, do you mean 'emit light'?"

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"Yes."

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"Does Fairyland have exactly the same ambient temperature as fairies?"

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"Most fairy kinds cannot see temperature."
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"Oh! So they glow by emitting a different wavelength of light than the one associated with their temperature. That makes sense. I apologize for taking so long to identify the confusion." They're in front of Sauron now.

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"Taking no extraneous actions and excepting mention of my name, which you may not say, answer our questions truthfully, with all relevant information, as concisely as you can under those constraints, and promptly," Promise tells Sauron.

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Fëanor beams at her.

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"How did you learn that Promise was in Beleriand?"

"We captured some orcs who had ranged far outside where they were supposed to be. They said they'd been ordered there by someone who could make you obey her if you had her name. Then I observed the fortress in secret until I knew more about her capabilities"

"What are the elements, ordered by atomic weight?"

He lists them.

"Tell me whatever will be most valuable to me of the math and science you know -"

This may take a while.
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"If you don't phrase it as a question the order won't actually cover it," Promise says. "I can tell him to obey your requests for information but every order is a chance to screw it up."

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"What would be most valuable to me of the math and science you know?"

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And she goes to repeat the same instruction to Melkor (defining 'our' for him since Fëanor's occupied) and goes to find some roof to sit on and sing, presuming that Maedhros and his boyfriend are still talking about their feelings since it hasn't been decades yet.

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She's definitely going to get hungry before Fëanor's done demanding science lessons. Or before Maedhros and his boyfriend are done talking about their feelings.

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And there are like no plants around here, ugh.

She flies out in search of plants.
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Everything around is mostly barren ash. A hundred miles out there are trees and so forth.

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Then it will take her a while to get plants, but get plants she will. Plenty of them so she has a while before she has to make more trips. She comes back full of leaves and with an armload more of the tasty kinds.

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On her way back she will see Maedhros and his boyfriend. They are sitting on the ground, not touching, and wave her over.

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She supposes it is unlikely they were going to spend the next several decades continuously talking about their feelings. Over she goes.

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"I'm sorry about the food situation," Maedhros says. "About sixty years ago he killed everything but I'd have expected some of it to grow back. We'll have to build the place for everyone to live a little farther south. What's my father doing?"

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"Probably still interrogating Sauron about math and science. He didn't look like he was going to stop any time soon."

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"I guess that's a safe topic. I was worried he'd ask something broad like 'what do you know that would interest me'."

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"- I can go narrow the order."

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"What? No, I don't have the right to withhold anything from him, there's just stuff I'll be happier if he doesn't think to ask. He probably won't."

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"...I could make it sound like it was about me."

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"When I said "I don't have the right" I didn't mean "I can't get away with". But thank you."

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"Why wouldn't you have the right?"
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"He's my King. He's my father. You have neither, it's a little hard to explain."

"Promise," says Maedhros' boyfriend, "would you go change the orders for me? Maitimo does not understand that he is allowed to want things that don't serve big worldly ambitions."
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Promise glances between them uncertainly and sets down her pile of leaves and flies Angbandward.

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Fëanor is talking about current and voltage with Thauron.

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She contemplates wordings, then remembers Sauron can do the telepathy thing. Inconspicuously as possible, omit from your remarks details about how you tortured people and the fact that I made this update. Melkor gets a copy too, she's assuming he's next.

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Fëanor does, eventually, get around to asking "what else do you know that'd be of interest to me?"

"Your son is in love with Nolofinwë's," Thauron says, "and has and would choose him over you, your mother swore to kill you as a child, your only grandchild disowned his whole family, Elwing of Sirion leapt off a cliff after she lost the Silmaril, Elu Thingol regarded you as a pathetic waste of your father's line, the Silmarils will burn your hands, most of your children do not love you -"

"What's my fathername?"

"Curufinwë", Thauron says, and falls silent.

Promise? I think we're ready to dispose of this one.
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You're done already? I was expecting you to be there for weeks, she says from out where she has been accumulating leaves.

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I am a fairly fast learner.

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If you're sure.

I think we are out of uses for Sauron now.
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He could have a redemption arc, Eru says.

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How would you go about doing one of those?
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I would strip him of his powers in the hope that he would be humbled and that, if not, he could not do harm. I would put him into a form that inspires pity - perhaps that of a small child - and give him reasons to pursue understanding of the wrongs he did and opportunities to try to right them.

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I am fairly sure he does not strictly require magical powers in order to do harm.

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We could figure out what he does require! If he does harm through talking he could lose the ability to talk. And so forth.

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So you want to metaphorically turn him into a frog.

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I want him to have the chance to seek a better path.

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Does it seem at all likely that he will do that?

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You have messed up all the likelihoods. You are going to have a strange and varied history. There are lots of worlds where he brings the world more good than harm, and some where he regrets the harm.

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Do you mean there are a bunch of Saurons in various worlds or that this is just the distribution of futures you observe in potentia and you can't tell which one is going to happen or what?
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The latter is much closer to what I mean. There are no other worlds with Saurons in them.

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What proportion is 'lots'?

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One in ten, perhaps.

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And in the other ninety percent he just fails to complete his redemption arc and maybe sets more people on fire?
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In most of them he is unable to do enough good to overcome the harm he did, because you and your allies have already fixed everything. In few of them does he do additional harm.

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What proportion is few?

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One in five?

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Also, does the definition of harm you're using closely resemble mine?

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I have been trying to use your understanding of all of the concepts you think with, as closely as I can. In one world Sauron develops a polio vaccine. This is not harm. He gives it to everyone. This is not harm. He uses the political leverage from that to persuade them to stop being mortals and find a way to live forever. This is not harm. They decide to do this by starting a war that kills millions. That is harm.

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What is a polio vaccine?
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Are you going to keep the mass-murdering engineer family around? I recommend that you do. You complement each other. A polio vaccine is a thing that can be given to mortals to stop them from one particular way mortals suffer and die.

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...Sauron's not the only person who can invent that, is he?

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He is not. Now that your acquaintances have talked with him I expect they will invent it as soon as the need rises to their attention.

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I would normally describe myself as being easily moved to mercy but in this particular case I don't feel very moved. I suppose I could ask Maedhros.

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He is not easily moved to mercy.

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There are probably non-mercy reasons to be willing to see Sauron metaphorically turned into a frog. Maybe I should ask his boyfriend if I should ask him, in case it would be upsetting to even entertain the question.

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Maybe you should do that.

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Promise goes looking for Maedhros's boyfriend.

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Fëanor happens to have just walked outside to do the same thing. Maedhros and Fingon are sitting on the ground, several feet of space between them, staring at Angband.

"Findekáno," Fëanor says. "Thauron thinks that my son is in love with you."




"I, like Sauron, have only secondhand information on that."

Maedhros does not say anything.

"I am inclined to be very angry but if Thauron thinks I should be that is sufficient reason not to be. Can you instead explain to me what he sees in you?"

"Do you know how many times I've been tempted to ask you the same question?" Findekáno says.

Maedhros buries his head in his hands.
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Awwwwwwkward. Promise's question can wait, Sauron's not going anywhere.

...Actually, she could just go talk to Sauron.

"What are the first three sentences you have to say," she asks Sauron, "on the subject of whether you should get, quote, 'a redemption arc'?"
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"Eru cares far too much about narratives at the expense of people," he says, "and scripted my role. If he is scripting another for me, I cannot promise not to twist it. If he'll stop making stories with me I will stop hurting people in them."

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"You know, I have some sympathy for the sentiment but under the circumstances that is not even slightly tempting me to argue to anyone that you don't belong in a black hole."
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He doesn't answer. He can't answer.

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"Next three sentences on the subject?"

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"I want to end fate. I don't know what you want or in what capacity I could help you with it. Our oaths are more comprehensive than orders and safer to use with hostiles in many ways, though I am not sure if it'd work properly if you ordered me to swear one."

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"I have no idea," she sighs, "and less idea of oath architecture than I do of fairy orders. Do you want to end fate in general or do you mean something more specific?"

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"My objection was always specifically to the fates designed for this world, but it looks like they're probably already off course. Eru has other projects and I'd want the same thing there."

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Promise regards him thoughtfully, then goes to see if the family drama's over with yet so she can talk to Maedhros's boyfriend.

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The family drama is over in the sense everyone is staring at each other resentfully.

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Promise looks at Maedhros's boyfriend. "Erm, what do I call you?"
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"Nothing that fairy magic can use against me, hopefully," he says.

"She can do it all from one syllable," Maedhros says, "so she got everyone from Finwë anyway."

He raises an eyebrow. "Findekáno, then."
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"I'll be happy to call you all by nicknames if you pick things, I don't have to use your real names just because I have them, that would be rude."

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"We've spent a while going by names that weren't ours. Unless it's plausible there'll be other fairies around I'd rather not do it again."

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"Okay, Findekáno it is." Can I interrupt the staring at each other thing to ask you something privately?

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Yeah. It's going well; he hasn't had his other children bodily throw us out. What do you need?

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Need to know how much it'd upset Maedhros to be asked what he thinks of Eru's desire to give Sauron a redemption arc.

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A lot. He'd prefer to be asked despite that, but possibly not right now. Why don't you suggest to Eru that he give everyone else who compromised their values and their integrity for this war a redemption arc?

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Um, okay.

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I don't expect it to go over well, but it's worth the suggestion. I suppose you could at a minimum get Sauron to swear never to act in a way he expects you'd disapprove of, but that's not airtight.

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I really don't know how oaths work, I only have practice with fairy orders.

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I don't know anything about fairy orders, so I can't compare notes with you usefully. If you gave an order like that how would it go wrong?

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Fiddling with one's expectations to have a self-serving or just exasperating model. He would always be able to choose inaction. Depending on how good he is at doublethink he might be able to do anything he didn't think I'd find out about.

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Sighs. We couldn't do any of those, not very well, but he's a Maia, perhaps he could. Of all the people it's not safe to let live -

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I'm only a little tempted to go with the redemption arc and he didn't even have me very long.

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Maitimo's not going to think about that except insofar as he asks himself 'will I be fully functional with him around'.

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Well, that's a consideration too.

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He won't be.

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Well, Eru also advises me to 'keep his family around' so if this is the trade I'm potentially making I will sooner chuck Sauron into a black hole.

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Keep his family around for what? Is there going to be a trial?

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...No idea, but what Eru said was that we complement each other?

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I think that means that they can build you things and you can save them from themselves. It's a full time job; are you sure you want it?

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I don't know if I want it based on that description.
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He nods. Yeah.

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But I like Maedhros and Maglor, and Fëanor's reaction to plain speech was funny.

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I expect Eru's plan would certainly have very - dramatic results.

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What do you mean?
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My cousins are dramatic and Eru likes dramatics. So.

He sighs.


They're the most intelligent people you'll ever meet, once they recover a little bit - all of them very narrowly, but differently narrowly, and they usually fill in for each other as needed. They aren't good people but that's because our world has kind of a fucked up understanding of what goodness is. I don't know what task he thinks they'd complement you for.
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I'm not sure either. Talking to him is kind of weird.

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You could ask Fëanor. He'd probably be able to figure it out.

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I might do that.

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Eru sent me here?

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There was a lot of back-and-forth about where to put dead people and Maedhros thought you were going to wind up somewhere else but the actual algorithm was where they'd be best served to wake up with somebody getting a second-best option if there was likely to be violence so I guess Eru didn't think there would be violence.

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He shakes his head. All right. How are you doing? You don't have to, like, continuously command Eru to not make the world stop, do you?

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No. I haven't actually been enforcing any orders recently, I got him to agree to cooperate on the big stuff.

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Nicely done. What's left?

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I think I may not have gotten all the dead people because apparently different kinds of people go different places when dead, so I want to check on that, and I don't know if he'll want to give Melkor a redemption arc too or what, aaaaaand Eru says he's personally necessary if Maedhros wants to stop existing altogether but I'm sort of hoping he will change his mind about that.

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Please don't do that.

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Even if he really wants?

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You have Eru on the line, there has got to be a set of other things such that he stops really wanting that.

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Like what? I don't want to go anywhere near time travel, that sounds horrendously dangerous.

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No. Like - some absolutely irrevocable way for him to get out of any situation he's in and doesn't want to be, probably. Also he should be better now that the oath's gone but I don't think he's given himself a chance to really process the implications of that yet.

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Well, I'll deal with the other stuff first and when Maedhros is the last thing on the list we can talk about that, but speaking as an obligatorily immortal creature I wouldn't want to force him to exist if he can't be okay with existing.

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He hasn't tried not being a Feanorian, which is how most people manage finding existence enjoyable. I was prepared to kill him, when I rescued him. I'm not - he doesn't belong to me. But there are decisions he shouldn't be making while he's like this.

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Well, it seems to be taking a while to decide whether Sauron gets a redemption arc and Eru does not seem very impatient about it. No big rush.

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The world is billions of years old. As far as Eru is concerned, this all happened in a blink. Or - I'm not even sure if he has a concept of time. If Maedhros decides in a thousand years he wants to die, he can.

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He says he exists outside of time. It was sort of alarming.

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Yeah. You have some nerve. I am glad it worked out like this.

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Me too.

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Anything else?

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That was all I meant to talk to you in particular about. You can go back to staring contests.

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Thank you for Maitimo.

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You're welcome, to the extent that I was involved in providing him.

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He does return to the staring contest, with determination.

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Good luck with that.

To Fëanor: Do you know what Eru meant when he said I complement your family?
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Hmmm.

Why haven't you ordered Eru to give you access to all his pet projects so you can straighten them out, and to stop making new ones?
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Ordering hostile vassals is tricky and I have almost exclusively observational experience with the skill, he's really complicated and I don't understand a lot of his powers, and he won't cooperate on the rest of fixing this world if he thinks I'm not going to quit while I'm ahead there.

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Do we have a way to do it without him?

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If you can get me to Fairyland I can gate anywhere if I have an idea of where I mean to go. Prospects are fuzzy from there.

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'one of Eru's worlds that needs us' probably isn't enough of an idea. If they're all within this universe, and I think they are from what he conveyed during the black holes explanation, I could specify star systems, but that'd still be an inefficient way to do it. I can't assess in what respects they'll need fixing but if we had a way to bring back our dead I am very sure we could do it.

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I could ask for some sort of persistent dead-raising ability, maybe.

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Or a planet where we are automatically reborn without fuss or judgment if we're killed. There are lots of unused planets. We should perhaps choose one as a base of operations other than this one, I think it'll raise tensions to have us here. I can set Maitimo to building me a peaceful base-of-operations planet while we find an efficient way of identifying worlds of Eru's where we're needed so you can gate to them.

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Planets are weird and I wouldn't be confident issuing any instructions about them.

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You've been issuing plenty about this one.

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Not about the planet part.

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We can also take over this world it's just going to take a few hundred years at minimum.

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That sounds messy and distracting.

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I know. That's why I suggested getting an unoccupied planet somewhere.

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Okay, well, you're the one who understands planets, what exactly should I be asking for?

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From now on Elves that die should be reborn here, except Elves who choose to follow me into exile from this planet, those should be reborn on a different one that has habitable conditions, and he should show it to you so he can gate to it.

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What about non-Elves?

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I have never met any.

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...she's standing right there. Okay, I guess I'll ask somebody else about them.

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Curufinwë met and collaborated with Dwarves and Men.

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She glances around, which one is he, is he here? Ah there he is. Thanks.

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Certainly.

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She goes over to Curufinwë. I hear you're the person to talk to about local non-Elves. I don't think they were covered by the dead people thing and I might have to arrange a separate dead people thing.

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No one knows the fate of Men when they die. Dwarves cease to be, I think. There are rather going to be too many of them and a lot of people will starve if you bring them all back here.

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Your father was talking about settling other planets...

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You wouldn't need a whole planet, were it less war-torn than this one.

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Well, okay, is there some straightforward solution to how war-torn this place is?

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You could ask him to fix it, if you trust him to do it in roughly the right way. He likes crumbling ruins of fallen empires, so.

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He has... different aesthetics from me. I don't plan to micromanage him because that would probably do more harm than good but I'd like a better picture of the problem and what solving it might look like before he goes and does stuff.

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There are a lot of Men and they breed very fast. Bringing them all back when they die is probably better than not doing that but possibly not ideal, and does present the resource problem. Sending them to another planet might be nice but some Men will probably kill themselves to get to the next planet. An optimal solution would look something like what we have for Elves, which is where there's a known place you get reembodied right away with no fuss, except we'll need far more space to accommodate Men. Given peace and enough food within an Age there'll be a hundred billion of them.

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I think the estimate I heard for the other mortal world is five billion but I don't know how long they've been at it and they only have one planet...

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And die, right? The immortality is a big part of what makes them unsustainable.

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Yeah, and they die.

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Which is unacceptable, but making enough space for a hundred billion of them is also going to be a little difficult.

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Could the planet just be... bigger? I don't understand how planets work, Fairyland isn't a planet.

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No, it couldn't. You probably are going to need to know how planets work to do this. Making them bigger doesn't work. Making it round might, but only if you really trust Eru.

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I thought planets were round. That is one of the only things I thought I knew about planets.

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This one's not. It's flat. Didn't you notice when you were flying around on it?

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I was told they were so big that they looked flat to people on them, but were in fact round.

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No, it's just actually flat. The rest of them are like you described, though you can see the curvature from the air and would still notice it flying.

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Okay. So the Men have to spread out to different planets because there are going to be too many of them if they don't die, what's a good way to make sure they have space without being cut off from anybody they want to see...?

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A way to get between the planets would be the best way. They should only need two.

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Why would two be enough if they reproduce so fast?

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Eventually they will learn how to get between planets on their own. By the time there are a hundred billion of them they should have it figured out. If not we can help them, but that's likely a thousand years out and shouldn't be our priority.

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Okay.

And Promise relays the gist of this notion to Eru.
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I can bring back all the currently dead Men on Mars, and make Mars nice for them, and make a doorway between this world and the next one.

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That sounds right, assuming Mars is a planet. What about Men being mortal in general?

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They are supposed to be. It is their nature.

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Why?

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It gives their lives more meaning and better narrative structure.

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Eru you are full of shit. Does anything happen to them after they die or do they just stop?

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They go to the afterlife.

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Which is?

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Inherently mysterious and impossible to explain.

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What, even if she gives him eight hours? That sounds like it must be confusing for them.

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They're supposed to have faith.

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Do they?
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Yes! They're rather astonishingly good at it. Surpassed my expectations. Well. I know the whole timeline. But 'surpassed my expectations' comes close to conveying the real sentiment.

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Then maybe they should get something nice for having managed that so well?

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They could live to be three hundred, instead of just one hundred, and not age until they're nearly at the end of that span?

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That... would be nice but maybe not nice enough.

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I could make them taller and prettier.

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Definitely not what I had in mind, especially if any of them would object to suddenly looking different.

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I can't give them magic powers. Kind of the point of mortals is how much they achieve without any magic powers.

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I really am kind of getting at letting them be immortal if they want.

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We have that. They're called Elves. You want to make mortals stop existing and just make a lot of Elves with the same names and memories the old mortals had.

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Well, mortals are already a thing, too, there's this whole other mortal world, I met somebody from it. No magic and everything. I don't think anybody that I know of is already doing immortals who used to be mortal and then got a really nice present.
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How about this: mortals, when they die, can choose to come back or to go to the Afterlife, as they prefer.

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Close enough.

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Okay! I did that! And I made Mars habitable! I had to make it bigger first. And there's a very large dramatic gate between this world and Mars. It's over a river so you have to get into a boat to travel between them. I thought it was more dramatic that way. And all the Men who've ever died are on Mars, arranged to wake up around people who will be good for them to be near. All young and in good health, too.

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Thanks.
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Dwarves I shall just wake up here. There aren't as many of them.

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That sounds good. Can they stop dying too?

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I shall have to ask Aulë about that. I am not sure what his plan was.

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...?

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Ah! Aulë meant to bring them all back when Arda was healed. Well, Arda's been healed early, so I'll bring them back now and make them immortal in the fairy fashion, impossible to fatally injure and reawakening at home if their body is destroyed.

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Oh, is that what happens to me? I didn't know.

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Well, now I've changed your fairy nature, so maybe that changed? I was trying to hold everything else steady, so I don't think so.

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I don't think making me immune to orders is the sort of thing that would affect that.

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Then it is probably the same. I can't see into Fairyland since it's not one of my projects.

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Well, I'll just hope it continues not to come up, I guess.

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Are those all of the things you wanted to change?

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I think so, about that... Am I missing any kinds of people or contingencies about how they die?

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Hobbits are going to exist eventually! When they do they'll be like Men and I'll change them up to be like Men are now. Ents live forever anyway. I suppose when they burn down or are cut down I can have them regrow? I'll do that.

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...Sounds good. Are Ents... trees?

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They are.

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Tree people?

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Yes!

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That's really neat.

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Thank you. They're lovely. You're welcome to go meet them sometime.

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I will remember that.

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There are no other peoples! Unless you count animals.

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I don't really know what to think about animals because Fairyland doesn't have them, except fairies who've been turned into them and not very many of those.

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I think animals are perfect the way they are.

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Yes of course you do you made the place. "Does anybody have any input on animals and the design thereof?" she asks aloud. "I have never seen an animal in my life, so."

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The Elves raise their eyebrows. "Uh, if there were a way for them to not suffer while not changing their behavior, that'd probably be good," blond Elf offers. "Animals dying isn't a problem, they don't have a sense of themselves the same way, but they usually die slowly and horribly and they do suffer like anyone else."

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"...That sounds awful." Can you fix that like he said?

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There is something like the cosmic equivalent of a sigh. Nature, red in tooth and claw. It's supposed to be a vicious world out there.

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It doesn't even sound like a story, to be honest.

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I changed it.

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Thank you. "He says he changed it."

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"Nelyo," says the blond one, "I'm kind of disappointed that you took longer than a week to win this thing."

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Blink. Who's Nel- oh, it only clicks for Maedhros. "If that's because of what I'm doing, he could hardly have done that, he isn't a fairy."

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"Right, a week from when he found you."

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"I didn't tell him Eru's name worked."

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"So -"

"Tyelcormo, please drop it," Maedhros says.

His brother does.
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She's puzzled but not sure what to ask.

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Maedhros sees her hesitating. "My brother thinks 'what orders should Maedhros have given Promise to end this within a week' is an interesting puzzle and was going to spend the next hour puzzling it out. I think this might be insensitive to you, so I asked him not to."

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"Oh. I mean, in principle you could have done it but if you'd actually tried it this wouldn't be going nearly so well because you'd have been trying to order Powers around at one remove through a hostile vassal."

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"Yes. Using Eru's name would have been a horrifyingly bad idea and I think I'd have recognized it as such. I don't personally find 'how could it have been done' to be a rewarding puzzle, which is another reason I suggested my brother stop doing it."

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"Okay."

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"Are you done with Eru?"

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"Sauron and Melkor are still around. I'm not sure if there's a plan to interrogate Melkor like Sauron but he's under the same order to answer questions, if so."

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Maedhros goes still again. "I'm sure there is. Thank you. Okay. Father, how long are you expecting to want to talk to Melkor?"

"Up to a day, not longer," his father says, "the fundamental principles the universe operates on are pretty simple and I think I already know most of it, and he does not interest me otherwise."
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Promise glances at Fingon. Topic's going to be hard to avoid.

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When King Emotionally Clueless isn't around, maybe? Fingon says back.

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I can only tell who you're talking about if I can use whether the name snaps into place or not.
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Fëanor.

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When is he going to not be around?

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He's going to go talk to Melkor, right?

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At some point, presumably.

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"Uncle, did you ask Sauron if there's an efficient algorithm for the satisfiability problem where every clause has three terms?" Findekáno says, and Fëanor goes off to ask this.

Findekáno does not smile until he's gone.
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"I don't even know what that means," Promise says, "I'm really going to need to get some kind of more thorough education than Fairyland had to offer me when I was newer. Uh, so. - Eru is hoping to give Sauron a 'redemption arc', I don't know about Melkor but it seems not unlikely he'd like him to have one too."
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Maedhros doesn't move. Then he says "yes, you should get someone to explain algorithm theory to you, it's the root of all our magic that's not through music directly.


Why Thauron? Why not some random orc who never would have hurt people if not for their orders?"
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"...The orcs are all okay too, I don't think we were going to throw any of those in a black hole?"

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"Does by 'redemption arc' he just mean 'no black hole'?"

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"No, he also means removing whatever abilities he uses to do harm, possibly putting him in a cute or pitiful form, and encouraging him to remorse and compensating for the harm he did. I mentioned this to Sauron and I don't think he's going to cooperate but Eru's the one who can ambiguously see the future -" She relays the proportions and clarifies that she checked Eru was using her definition of "harm".

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He raises an eyebrow. "Ask Sauron to swear to care about all and only the things you care about and only employ means you'd use."

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"Do you think he'd rather do that than go in a black hole?" she asks in a small voice.
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"Both of them are ceasing to exist," he says. "I'm not sure. You could ask."

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She goes and waits for Fëanor to be done with his question.
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Fëanor's question gets an answer that is satisfying to Fëanor but makes no sense to her.

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That was predictable.

"As compared to being chucked into a black hole," Promise says to Sauron, "how do you feel about swearing to care about all and only the things I care about and only employ means I'd use?"
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"...indifferent. In both cases you are ending me and deciding what to do with my body. That is a clever way of making use of it, though."

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She sighs. "Anything in the neighborhood you'd actually prefer?"

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"I'll swear to work towards only the things you'd care about, if I can care about whatever I'd like."

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She goes out to mention this to the assembled Elves.
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The assembled Elves think that this sounds like a lot of bother for the sake of Thauron and if he's indifferent between the two methods of execution why not get all the Maia-power on their side with none of the drawbacks?

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"Well, I'd find it kind of horrifying in a way the black hole option isn't."

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It is kind of horrifying. So is Thauron.

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"Thauron is horrifying because of things he did and having him make a mind-altering oath like that would be something I was doing."

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"You still haven't explained what you want to accomplish," Fëanor says, "succinctly enough that I can evaluate whether this risk serves you."

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"I want to accomplish a lot of things. It seems like having Sauron around might make some of them more convenient but whatever Maedhros likes to call it I draw some distinction between fairy orders and mind control and I really don't like the idea of mind control even compared to people ceasing to exist."

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"I'm not sure being a prisoner in your own head while your body carries out someone else's will is even slightly better than changing someone's will. But if you'd rather kill him I have no objections."

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"I've tried the first. Second scares me more."

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"I used to try to make decisions based on what scared me most. Then I learned I'm unusual."

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"...I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from that."

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"That you're probably also unusual and a world designed to your tastes in the naive sense wouldn't be designed to your taste in the broad sense of desiring that people get what they want."

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"Point taken. I would still find it unsettling to have an actually-not-just-fairy-orders mind-controlled Maia following me around and do not prefer it, at least not if he's indifferent between that and death."
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"In that case just kill him."

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"I guess," she sighs. It's not a very satisfying conclusion, but I don't think trying to lead him along a redemption arc would actually be satisfying either.

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All right, says Eru, sounding disappointed. Are you done already?

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Done with...?

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Sauron. So it is time for me to put him in a black hole. You should ask for last words, it's more dramatic.

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Okay then. Back into the fortress.

"Would you like to say any last words, and if so, what are they?" she asks Sauron.
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"If you think it will be helpful to him you should tell Maitimo that I was able to talk in his head at great range, he wasn't crazy. And that none of us can properly imitate the sensation of holding one's breath, in a hallucination, so if he is ever in doubt he can do that."

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Promise relays this information to Maedhros by osanwë.
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That's interesting.
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Technically I asked him what he wanted his last words to be and he could have wanted those to be them even if they weren't true, I can check.
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Please do.

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"Is that true?"

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"Yes."

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Confirmed.

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Thank you. Osanwë can apparently sound very brittle.

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Promise regards Sauron thoughtfully. He probably picked those last words for a last-ditch attempt at evoking mercy, but they were genuinely helpful and everything -

...I don't think I'm going to get any less conflicted in any direction for the foreseeable future.
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It was a very short redemption arc, Eru says with satisfaction.

Sauron vanishes.
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Well, as long as Eru's happy with it.

Okay, he's gone.
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Declare it a festival day, Maedhros says, not with any particular joy in his voice.

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She sighs and flies out again to munch leaves.

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Fëanor talks with Melkor. Everyone else heads south and starts building a city, mechanically, as if building cities on bare ground is a thing they do all the time.

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Promise has never seen a city before in her life.

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Well, now she will. She is probably too small to be any use on the heavy lifting.

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Yep. She could sing? Is singing useful for cities?

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It is! Maglor is going to sing some stone over and she can help with that but first they need to clear the site and identify good stone, and singing is less useful for that.

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Yeah, she has no ability to help, there. She could write up information about how gates work, when you can do sorcery, in case this is useful for making gates when you cannot do sorcery?

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Great! They will appreciate having such notes.

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So she does that. And eats plants. And sees a squirrel and is really freaked out.

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So is the squirrel; it darts away. And then stone has been identified and Maglor invites her to help him sing it into place.

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Which she does.

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The city rises around them quite quickly. The Elves are good at this and coordinate without speaking at all. Only some of the newly released prisoners are helping but all of them seem cheered to watch.

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That's good.

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And eventually Fëanor comes walking out. "I have learned what I can of Melkor, as well."

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Do you want to give him a redemption arc too?
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No, he did everything of his own will and cannot be redeemed.

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Oh. Okay then.

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If you are done I will put him in a black hole.

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"We're sure we're all done with him and don't need to ask him questions about algorithms or anything?"

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"I know everything about algorithms," says Fëanor delightedly.

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"Okay. Here are things about gates." She hands him things about gates. I think we're done.

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Boom! Not really; sound can't escape a black hole.

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...Thank you.

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Is that all? I would like to be released so I can edit Middle-earth to stop permitting mind control in all flavors.

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"Okay, Melkor's gone, last call on things we need Eru for."
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"Round world," says Curufinwë. "Anyone in favor of the world being round? That's how worlds are supposed to go."

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"Fairyland is flat," she says, "but it's also not a planet, I do remember planets being supposed to be round - any other opinions on that -?"

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"It should be round," Fëanor says, and after that no one is inclined to disagree.

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They want a round planet.

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That's going to have to happen slowly enough you can perceive it, for me to do it without any side effects.

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She relays this complication.

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No one thinks it's much of a complication.

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Is it going to be very weird? she wonders.

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Probably. I haven't had the chance to round a planet yet, I wasn't going to round this one for another Age and then I was trying to swallow a continent so it was a bit different.

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Well, as long as it's safe and not, like, terrible to experience...
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Not terrible at all.

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Okay.

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And the earth starts moving. It's a bit like being on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. The survivors of Angband look unhappy.

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...Promise flies.

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It takes about ten minutes. The world is rouuuuuund, says Eru, it has no enddddddd, that's how long I want to be your friend!

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I beg your pardon?
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It's a song. From later in the timeline, you wouldn't have heard it yet.

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I guess not. Um, thank you. I think that's everything, but is there a way to petition you for things even once you've revised how fairy orders work here and such?

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Yes certainly! I shall build a temple to myself and then people can go there to ask for favors.

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Will that work better than people asking you things before did? she wonders.

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It will! I don't pay attention to the whole world, people might want privacy! But I can pay attention to a temple.

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The world is pretty big. Maybe you should have a few of them.

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I can put them all over the place.

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Sounds good.

"He's going to put temples to himself all over the place so people can ask him for things in case we forgot something. Is there anything that should not be left for that contingency?"
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"Has he set up the planet where Fëanorian dead from here forward are reembodied? Since it probably should not be this one?"

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Oh, right, they wanted people who throw in with them to wind up on a different planet rather than this one. Is there a spare?

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There are more planets in this galaxy than blades of grass in a field, and more galaxies than grains of sand on a beach.

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Okay, can there be another planet set up nice such that people who die and prefer to wind up there afterwards instead due to affiliating with the people on it do that?
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Do you want it to be a planet where sorcery works? I think that'd be more fun. And seven moons, and several other habitable planets in the solar system so you can have some fun before you've worked out interstellar travel. I'll make the main continent shaped like a star. and put a really tall mountain with a temple to me at the center.

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You know how to make sorcery work out of Fairyland?

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It works some places outside Fairyland. Not Arda, obviously.

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I noticed that. But what's making it work or not work if it's not 'presence in Fairyland'?

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Sometimes the things you would call the harmonics are very messy. Sometimes they're not.

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Oh. Well, clean harmonics on the planet would be nice and I think the rest of the design sounds good too.
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Done!

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Thanks! "He has made what sounds like a lovely entire collection of planets and sorcery's going to work there!"

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Fëanor nods. "Great. I cannot think of anything else we'd require that we cannot do ourselves."

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"...Okay."

Are there going to be weird time travel problems depending on how I release you? Also I would like to know what you're going to do to fairy orders so I know what to expect.
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I will not edit anything that you experience as earlier than this moment in the timeline. The Eldar will all become like Maedhros immune to fairy orders and unable to vassalize fairies. So will I; so will the Valar; the Dwarves might already be because of their immunity to mind-effecting magic but if not, they will as well. I don't think I will make fairy orders impossible on all of the worlds, because then you won't be able to go do interesting things and tell amazing stories there.

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What about the Men and the Ents and the hobbits and the other Maiar?

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All of the Maiar will be immune to fairy orders. I'm not sure about everyone else; I'm still looking at the stories that result.

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I'd rather not have to test it to find out...

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All right, all right. Fairy orders will still work on them.

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Okay. Anything else I should know?

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I can't think of anything.

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Okay. I will go ask at a temple if I think of something. Deep breath. You may operate freely.

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Have lovely adventures, dear!

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Thank you.

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The Elves are still building their city.

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"I let him go," she says. "Fairy orders aren't going to work on Elves or Valar or Maiar or Dwarves anymore."

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"Huh," one of Fëanor's sons who she doesn't know well says. "I thought he was going to make them not work at all?"

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"Oh, and they don't work on him either now. He left them on the other species. ...Possibly expressly to allow me to operate with my customary set of abilities because he thinks I'll create interesting stories."

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Fëanor shakes his head. "Well. As long as there's a substantial population they don't work on, the potential for abuse is at least curbed. And we might be able to develop some sort of technological solution -"

"I think it should be doable," Curufin says, "orders have to be parsed as language -"

"But fairies do really bizarre language parsing to start with -"

While they continue this conversation Maedhros smiles at her, looking almost relaxed. Well done.
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Thanks.

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A music hall is constructed, and a library, and trenches are dug that will eventually allow for running water. More of the prisoners are tentatively joining in.

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Promise sings, where that will help. Is Fëanor too busy with the city to pay attention to sorcery notes yet?

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He is not! He has read through them and has two possible avenues to gates: one is to make a magic artifact that stabilizes harmonics locally so they can gate, and the other is to find a non-sorcerous means of gating. The latter will probably go a little faster but the former might be more useful, what does she think?

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The former would indeed be more useful! Although the planet with the star shaped continent is going to have nice harmonics anyway.

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But this perhaps won't be true of every planet they want to gate to, assuming that 'go around to all of Eru's planets' is a thing she is planning to do. So the long way it is. It may take him a few decades, he hopes she's not in a particular hurry.

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She misses her tree. But it would take a really long time to grow one here big enough to live in without sorcery anyway. Also Thorn might have the place staked out and could take a while to stop doing that. She can wait.
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They can also take an army after Thorn, if she'd like.

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"He collects sorcerers. Most of them wouldn't be hanging out at my tree, but I don't know how the fight would go if it came to a full-on assault on his court. I guess he'd be really surprised that you were immune to orders but he's not unable to incapacitate people who he hasn't mastered.

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"I command, once they're all back alive and come here, around a hundred thousand people. And we have magic too."

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"As far as I know music isn't magic there. Unless it would have been really easy to miss. - But that many people immune to fairy orders and generally informed about the capacities of sorcery could probably take the court. Maybe even Queenscourt."

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"Artifact magic should still work, it's just slower. We probably should expect we'll need to take the Queenscourt, lest she notice whatever we're doing and object to it."

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"Yeah. My tree and Thorn's court are both on her continent, it's possible but not that likely that she'd notice. You can't deliver fairy orders anymore, though, and I can't guarantee a food claim on another fairy even though I've got a better than typical chance at it and I'm sure if it were easy to get her name out of her it would've been done long ago, so it's not entirely clear what to do with her - Thorn somebody can turn into a sparrow and have done, the Queen's a little too valuable for curbing Fairyland abuses in general."

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"Fairies don't have osanwë, right? All we need is for someone to think her name."

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"I'd bet it has never been spoken aloud and that she's done her level best to forget it herself. If her kind magic applies reflexively she won't have been successful but I wouldn't count on that."

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He nods. "I don't understand how fairies work well enough to give you an estimate on how long it'll take for some kind of artifact that'd help with that problem."

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"Might need one of the kinds of people who can still interact with fairy orders to make a food claim on her. And if her name's forgotten it would be necessary to continue ordering her via same."

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"Maedhros," Fëanor says, "do you know any Men we could enlist in an attack on the Queenscourt?"

"Do Men not age anymore?" he says. "It's a bit hard to predict what mood they'll be in in a century when we attempt this, that's a very big change."
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"They age, but when they die they can go on to their afterlife or come back, whichever they like."

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"Huh. I do not know any Men we could so enlist but would be happy to spend some time meeting some, if that's what we're doing."

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"We could bypass the Queen but she's very useful, potentially very obstructive for any in-Fairyland projects if not addressed, and will have concentrated most of the also-useful power and knowledge to be had in Fairyland."

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Maedhros looks at his father.

"I have no desire to rule Fairyland," he says, "so that'll be up to you."
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"Well, I suppose we have a while to think about it. But it's a reason to keep an eye out for trustworthy-seeming Men."

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"Which you'll want to do anyway, Father, they speak six or seven different languages," Maedhros says.

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...Giggle.

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"Is the workshop done?" Fëanor says. "I have so much to catch up on."

The workshop is done. It does not have tools but apparently those can be built.

"We should go back into Angband," says Maedhros who is making no moves in that direction, "and get coal."
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"...can I sing coal along?" Promise asks.

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"Stone-moving might move it, or might with a little tweaking. Dorthonion actually shouldn't be a bad place to mine for it. You should probably sit down with someone and get a science education, though, that's going to take a long time."

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"Okay. With whom?"

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Maedhros looks torn.

"Maitimo, obviously," Findekáno says, "it'd be a waste of time to send him to get coal from Angband and he explains science well and it'll be a few years before you need to know things that require the attention of the family geniuses."
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"Okay."

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Maedhros sends his boyfriend a look that is very hard to read and then sits down. "By 'science' we usually mean the facts about how our world operates and the techniques to figure them out. The techniques should work everywhere, the facts obviously aren't true in Fairyland. One interesting way to teach you science would be to set ourselves the project of understanding which of our inventions will work in Fairyland."

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"Nonmagical inventions or magical ones?"

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"Both. In theory I would have said before I met you that nonmagical inventions should work on every world that is similar enough to ours to have thinking people of any kind, because the principles that hold it together are the same ones that hold thinking people together. But you are a different kind of thinking person than I imagined, so perhaps I'm wrong about which rules might hold."

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"Well, we know Fairyland doesn't obey the thing about no creating new essences, although I guess it could just be technically magic every time something like the sourceless waterfall happens."

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"Yes. But does it obey things about combustion reactions, for example? Do fairies forge metal? Do they burn coal? Do things fall down when you drop them at the same speed regardless of their size?"

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"There's fire... Metal's not in common use but it exists and some fairies forge it. I don't think there's coal. I have not dropped things and watched them to check."

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And he starts explaining, very engagingly, the history of the Elf sciences and the things they know and have learned about the world, and the things you can do with that knowledge, and how they could predict whether gravity works in Fairyland from whether archery does, and so forth.

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Bows and arrows are a thing, although blowdarts are more popular for the obvious applications. Fairyland has sky islands. There's a spell you can do to an intact dewdrop but not to any other form of water. Entire regions spend long periods of time stalled on a single season or time of day; her tree is in a place where it is almost always autumn and usually afternoon. But there are things that seem to her recollection to behave pretty much as Elves would expect things to behave: water usually flows downhill and wind affects the shapes of clouds and fire behaves normally.

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"I would really love to see this place someday," he says. "It sounds beautiful."

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"It is! I didn't travel very much but there's art books, in libraries, paintings of all kinds of amazing places, and there were some nice things within flying distance of my tree too. There's... landscapes, here, but they're kind of drab."

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"You should have seen Aman in the time of the Trees."

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"Not drab?"

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"Beleriand was beautiful too before the war scarred it. But - no. Maglor should sing you something. It was glorious."

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Promise sings up an illusion of her tree, huge and just shy of sculpted, heavy with fruit and brilliant green against a backdrop of fall color on a dozen other types of trees and exotic varieties of underbrush, afternoon light cast through the canopy onto leaf litter and a rainbow of circled mushrooms and lichen-laced rocks.
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Maglor smiles. "We'll get you back there." And he sings the Trees, the universe cracked open to channel its light through two astonishing trees, each of them a million years old and sized to suit it, casting golden and silver light out across Aman.

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"...I don't think Fairyland has anything quite like those."

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"We don't either, not anymore. But we did." And he sings some more of Valinor's geography, of Tirion, of Valimar -"

"I told Eru to give the Teleri the swanships," Maedhros says.

This stops the song. Everyone stares at him.

"Huh," says Maglor. "Good idea."

And he sings of Alqualondë and its swanships.
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Apparently it caused a time travel problem. It was alarming. But they're very pretty.

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We burned them. It was - not the greatest of our crimes, but up there.

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Why did you do that?
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My father was angry and afraid. He makes mistakes when he's either of those things and bad mistakes when he's both.

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...But why this particular mistake?

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We were supposed to send the ships back to get some people who didn't like my father and didn't trust him, and it was mutual, and he wanted a demonstrative way of communicating his lack of intent to send the ships back for them.

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Oh.

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It wasn't one I thought I'd ever have even a partial chance to set right.

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Well, I'm glad the time travel effects weren't too bad.

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Haven't even noticed them. Or - wouldn't I? Would I think everything had always been this way even if it was different?

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Eru said that they were originally a thing that could only be made once, so to put them back he had to make it so they were not such a thing. I still remember being told that, I don't know what you remember.

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I remember thinking they were a thing that could only be made once. So perhaps he changed that fact without changing the fact people believed it and acted on it.

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That's probably the tidiest way.

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Certainly less creepy than changing all our memories. Anyway, the dead are back, the boats are back - I feel better about being a mass murderer whose victims are all living.

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I am trying to think how best to apologize to them.

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I'd offer advice but I don't really have any.

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I doubt they want to see me. I have no idea if there's anything they'd want to hear from me. I cannot put myself in their heads very well.

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Maybe you could wait until somebody shows up demanding an apology.

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Finno did, He looks affectionately at Findekáno, who is building a house. But it was different because I knew he'd already forgiven me, and wanted an apology mostly because I wanted to offer one.

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...I'm not sure how that makes it different except in being pleasanter.

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It is different than the circumstances under which most of the apologies will be demanded, so doesn't help me know what to expect from them.

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Fair enough.

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Findekáno's family arrived nearby. They will probably be next. I - I'd expect Elwing to come eventually. Just warning you.

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Yeah.

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I will of course explain to her how orders work and what I did.

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I don't really expect that to clear up everything between her and me, but thank you.

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No, I don't expect so. I am sorry. You are really the first person to whom I owe an apology, but - science lessons and the tools to hop through the galaxy doing as you see fit really seems like it will suffice in some sense in your case, and most people don't want such easy things.

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I could have gotten away if I'd wanted.

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Before I sent you to Ulmo, even? I realized later that at that point you could have done.

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That was the obvious loophole in the orders I actually got but I was also not leaning nearly as hard as I could have on how guilty you were about it, and I think if I had you would have messed up exploitably sooner.

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He smiles at her. Yes, probably. I am sorry anyway.

Do you want us to build you a house here?
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That would be useful. She sings up the inside of her tree as she left it: bed nook above the bookshelf. Kitchenette, table, cushions to sit on.

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We can do something very much like that.

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I might need more bookshelf than that, here.

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Noted. And he smiles at her again and goes off to talk to Findekáno. They still don't touch, but they move like one when they're building things.

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Awwww.

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People come back with coal a little while later. A forge is lit. The town is already getting quite noisy.

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Promise needs more sleep than these people do. She finds a tree with a sleepable branch and sleeps on it.

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When she wakes up they are still working. Maedhros waves at her. Want to talk about science more?

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Sure. Over she flutters.

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This is how we learned everything we know about botany. Planting beans in fairyland to see if genetics works would be very interesting. Does she know enough about breeder fairies to guess about trait heredity?

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She's never interacted closely with them; breeder courts tend to be unmixed, none of them lived very near her tree until shortly before she was captured, Thorn only had a handful and they didn't talk to Promise about their families. She does know that breeders have all different ways of reproducing and they don't consistently involve two parents and definitely don't consistently involve the sort of things mortals do to have children. Actually, she's not sure if any of them involve that? She's pretty sure she's never heard reference to a pregnant fairy?

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Huh. Okay, bean plants it is, then. The way fairies do it seems sensible.

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Fairies do breed plants! All kinds of plants. Probably many kinds of plants were bred once and then spread from there unattended. There is frequently magic involved but she thinks not always?

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So perhaps plants in fairyland have genes. Though perhaps not, if they don't die - do they never die? If they do die, what eats the debris, because here there are insects and worms for that...

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Oh, plants die! And rot, eventually.

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Do you have very very small animal-like things that can't even properly be called animals? And can only be seen under microscopes? Do you have microscopes?

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No microscopes.
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Well! This will be an interesting thing to check when they have microscopes. Here is the concept. He can't show her one now because lens grinding takes time.

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She doesn't know if they have the tiny not-animals! Maybe they do. (It transpires that they do have algae.)

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He doesn't know enough to make many inferences from that, but interesting. Do they get sick?

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No.

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He's not sure what to teach next. There's a lot. What interests her?

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Animals are weird! She saw a squirrel the other day and it was so weird! The only information about animals she has is the three traditional kinds that fairies turn people into when they're pissed off (snail, frog, and sparrow, depending on how pissed off)!

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There are thousands of kinds! He'd be delighted to tell her all about them. He supposes horses are less useful if you can fly.

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...You sit on them? And then they move you?

...That's really, really weird.
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...right, not being children, fairies probably also don't do piggyback rides.

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By and large, no. And smaller fairies are on average faster than big ones, although it's not consistent, she's faster than a patient mossy.

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Well, Elves and Men ride horses. It's quite a lot of fun, actually, though he can't compare it to flying.

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She does not see the appeal even trying to take the perspective of someone who doesn't have flight as an option, really. Animals: so weird. They just look kind of fundamentally incorrect to her.

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He can't really relate. Animals look lots of different ways anyway. Does Fairyland have coral?

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Yes, it does.

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Coral: technically an animal.

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Huh. It doesn't act like one.

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Animals come in all different kinds, like he said. Sparrows are not much like snails either.

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It's true, they're not. She was vaguely aware it was three representatives from a very broad category, quite as broad as 'plants', but she didn't realize coral counted.

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Coral counts. Dinosaurs count. He'd love to take her to meet some but they're all in Valinor.

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She's never even heard of dinosaurs. Are they more like coral or squirrels or snails or frogs or sparrows or horses?

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"...horses. Or sparrows. Depending what kind of 'like' you're thinking."

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"Which ways are they like those?"

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"If you looked at their skeleton it'd be more like a sparrows. But they're very large and if you saw them you wouldn't think of much commonality with sparrows. And the ones I've seen eat grass like horses. And you can ride them if you are very immortal or very reckless."

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"...what happens if you try to ride them?"

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"They might run very fast, or throw you off, or the bigger ones that eat the ones who eat grass might eat you."

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"Isn't running very fast the point of riding a thing?"

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"If you can hold on - oh, Fairyland has normal momentum, right?" This is how momentum should work.

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"That sounds about right."

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"Aww. There'd be some awesome tricks we could pull if it didn't work that way. And we could use gates for ridiculous energy weapons."

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"How?"

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"Depends on what specifically the difference was. But imagine if in your world, a small thing coming loose from a big thing didn't maintain its momentum the way I explained. Then we could build a gun at the gate which - actually, you tell me." He grabs some paper. "How could we shoot things out of gates at absurd velocities, if the world worked like that?"

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"...I mean, the obvious exploit on gates now that there's someplace other than Fairyland where they'll work is to make horizontal ones and drop things through them until they get very fast and then gate them wherever you want to throw the fast thing, but I think that works even with momentum behaving like you're used to."

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"You can do horizontal gates? And gates in the air?" He grins. "Okay, we already have super fast smash weapons, we don't need multiple strategies for getting them."

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"Sure, they can point any direction and be wherever you like."

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"Can you open them in the middle of people? Or deep underground?"

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"Well," she says, "yes, but they won't automatically do anything in particular to things they begin by intersecting. And they can take up to a week to settle and stay put by space, not by adjacent items, so I don't think you could aim things inside a person very well that way."

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He nods. "Outer space?"

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Blink.

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"How high in the sky can you put a gate?"

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"I can't fly arbitrarily high because the air thins out too much but as high as I like, if I'm there, I think."

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"As soon as we figure out how to gate," he says, "let's go up in the sky, I think we'd both like that. If you go high enough there's no air at all; that's what we call outer space."

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"...I do not see what there is to like about being somewhere with no air."

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"You take some with you. You can see the whole world, and all the stars, much clearer without air in the way."

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"Oh. - Well, I don't think I see as well as you but that does sound nice."

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"Another thing to fix once we have the means to grind lenses! Do you want to talk about optics? It might even have applications for harmonics, I'm not sure."

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"I'm not sure why it would, but sure, why not."

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"To me the word harmonics calls to mind tangled strings, such that tugging one affects others, is that badly off? Anyway, wave behavior is a subject of study and if harmonics have anything to do with it then that's the loose outline of what my father will be doing to develop a harmonics-calmer for gating."

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"There's a sort of ripple effect around things that affect harmonics but it doesn't go all that far. I don't know that I'd say they behave like waves at all. They move in patterns, a little, but they mostly don't move over short term timescales."

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"Can you describe them? Can non-fairies learn sorcery?"

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"I can't directly sense them; when I want to map them I grid an area with weak fairylights and see how they're affected over the space. And yes, mortals can learn sorcery."

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"And how are fairy lights affected over a space?"

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"They'll be brighter or dimmer or flicker, and if I've tried to make them all the same and I've accounted well enough for the nonharmonic factors in the area then that leaves harmonics as the thing responsible for the differences. There's a nastily complex notation for it; I can't do the really fine maps because I can only distinguish so many grades of dimness, but I can map a spot better than having to feel it out if I'm going to be sorcering there a lot."

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"It's probably not particularly helpful to describe it to me until I can see it, and Father thinks that the general solution is a century or two out," he says reluctantly. "All right. Well, optics -" and this isn't as much fun without lenses and faceted stones to show Laurelin's light through, but he still remembers it.

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Optics! Optics is pretty neat.

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Watching people who are very definitely back alive build a city, while the Silmarils make the work lighter but there is absolutely no obligation to pursue anyone who might be tempted to take them, is pretty neat.

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Promise is pretty pleased with that. He hasn't even mentioned intending to wander off to find a temple and ask to cease to exist.

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Well, he can't do that now, everyone's back and they need him, none of the rest of them have any people skills. Not that he does, either, but he'll have them by the time there are gates.

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...close enough.

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And also Fairyland needs to be fixed.

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It does. Fairyland and lots of other places.

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Father's not even particularly ambitious, usually, he just likes solving problems and if you keep putting good ones in front of him then he's capable of astonishing goodness.

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"I'm more outright ambitious, I think."

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"You are the most ambitious person I've ever met. It's lovely."

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Giggle. "Really?"

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"I would probably not have used Eru's name and used Ulmo's only in with the convenient indifference of the suicidal. And most of the Eldar are less ambitious than me, and most Men have less scope for their ambitious, and Thauron's ambitions were grand in one sense and astonishingly small in another."

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"I think we are laying the foundations of your house today. Want to help sing them into place?"

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"Sure."

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They name the city Vanda Nossëo. Findekáno's family arrives to speak with them a week later, but they mostly seem to want to speak to Findekáno, and he leaves with them for a while and then placidly comes back. No one comments. Fëanor quizzes her about harmonics and runs the tests of plain speech that he wanted.

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She is happy to answer questions about harmonics and indulgent about tests of plain speech.

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Outrageously complicated speech with an exception carved in for people and animals, he disagrees, but can not learn much more about it.

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She can't even speculate why there'd be an exception for animals, that's weird. They're probably just piggybacking on the special snap-into-place nature of person names somehow.

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He's asked someone to acquire and name a pet rock for the next batch of tests when there's time.

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...a pet rock. Mortals are weird.

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Now that they reembody immediately if they die can she stop calling them mortals? It was inaccurate before but now it's really stretching it.

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'Nonfairies' is so clunky. Fine, though.

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Elves. Perfectly good word. If she has something against it, they can suggest others - Eldar, Quendi, Noldor - incidentally, do all those sound the same to her?

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Not exactly, but she can tell they mean similar things, except the last one, which is specific. She is not at all sure which exactly of these concentric groups is the gradation at which one encounters weirdness about pet rocks.

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"Feanorians," everyone says unanimously.

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That's even more specific!

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"And doesn't click as a name? Huh, interesting." Fëanor says. "So if you repeated it would people hear Feanorioni, if that's the language-specific suffix, or -"

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...she'll repeat the word a few times under various conditions. No, group names like that do not constitute names in the clicky sense, only a person's first, real name.

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It's not the clicky sense he's interested in, its what things her language parser chooses to parse as actual words in a specific language rather than as concepts for later sound-spread translation.

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She's pretty sure names for groups do not tend to count unless they are also names for the members of the group in the clicky sense. She could probably call him and his sons Finwëans and have that preserved as a name.

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But - Feanorians is just the subset of Finweans that includes all the real ones - why would one be a word when the other isn't-?

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Because their real names all have 'Finwë' in them.

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Fëanor instructs his children to produce him some grandchildren and name them 'feanorsomething'. No one is entirely sure whether he's joking.

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...she is probably missing something as a member of a nonreproductive species but that seems a little bizarre to her.

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"You can't order people to marry or bear children," Maedhros explains later. "It'd be very evil. I don't know enough about your world to think of an analogy, a line even bad fairies won't cross..."

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"...There's not really anything I can think of. Many very bad fairies still abide by chosen nicknames but I don't think it's universal."

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"Well, the Enemy crossed this line too, a million times over. But no person who is only our flavor of mass murderer would ever ever order someone to marry or bear children. Everyone would stop them. No matter the circumstances. If the world were at stake."

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"You don't even have enforced orders."
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"But our people obey us. So there are things it'd be wrong to order them to do."

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"The people who'd be ordered are not the same people who'd stop the order?"

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"I can definitely think of some people who, if a friend was ordered to marry someone, would physically intercede, but who if they were ordered to marry someone would go along."

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"That's weird."
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"I think it's actually quite normal."

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"It's weird that it's normal, then."

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"What does that even mean?"

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"I'm not judging weirdness against commonality, I'm judging it against - consistency with reasonable principles."

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"Hmm. It seems like 'if this costs me and benefits my people, trust that it's right, if it costs a friend and in my assessment the cost is not worth the benefit to my people, trust my instincts' might be reasonable if people think they are inclined to be self-serving but not excessively protective of others."

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"If you're not supposed to do it even if the world's at stake I wouldn't think underestimating the benefit would be a serious problem."

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"No, but people don't have instincts about defiance that are narrowly tailored to ridiculous requests like that, their instincts are formed more generally."

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"Maybe I don't get it because I don't relevantly have a people."

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"That might be part of it. Fairies also might not have much sense of fealty that doesn't come with orders or coercive exercises of power that aren't about envasselization."

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"Fairies sometimes turn over their names voluntarily. But I guess that's still not the same as having to choose it over and over again."

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"It is very much not."

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"There might be fairies somewhere who do it without names. I don't know."

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"No names and no oaths, now, but the people I love can still ask anything of me. I - I am glad we're not fairies. I wouldn't want my father to have my name. He has my life, and gladly."

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"Why?"

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"Because he needs it, to get things done, and he is good at doing things that matter very much to me."

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"Why does he need your life to do them?"

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"He just functions better when there are people he can rely on absolutely."

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"...that sounds like something he could stand to work on."

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He shrugs. "There are more important things on that list."

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"If you say so."

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"Please don't try lecturing him. Except about harmonics. It won't go over well."

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"I can definitely hold myself to pointed individual remarks and not entire lectures. But it turns out to be really really hard to get me to stop producing even those."
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"Then you two probably won't collaborate very productively." He sighs.

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"I mean, it'd depend on what came up in conversation."

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"My father tends to notice if people hold him in contempt and not like it."

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"Contempt would be a strong word for it."

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"Then you might be fine."

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"Good."

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"Disagreement he doesn't mind at all, or we'd have strangled each other Ages ago."

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"I outright ignore him when I think he's wrong. It's not that. It's about whether you see him as broken, I guess, for you, and whether I see him as worthy, I guess, for me."

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"I don't feel inclined to describe him as broken either."

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"So you just want it known that you'll occasionally make snarky comments about - what, our family dyanamics?"

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"I suppose? I don't know in advance exactly what I will make snarky comments about or I would probably have already made them."

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He grins. "Okay. We'll cope."

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"Good. I'm sort of proud of my bottomless capacity for snarky comments."

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"It has advantages."

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Angband catches his eye again; he stares at it as if he's forgotten everything else.

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Promise waves her hand in front of his eyes.
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"Sorry. What else did you want to do today?"

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"I don't have a rigid schedule or anything. Do you want to stare at Angband? It looked like maybe you didn't and were doing it anyway."

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"I do not want to stare at Angband, but I don't usually want things on the relevant time scale anyway." He stares at her, perplexed.

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"On what time scale do you want things?"

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"I want to fix Fairyland. I want to fix all the worlds. I want to repair my family."

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"Sounds good."

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"I think so."

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"You sort of explained the concept of children and all the connotations associated a while ago but I still don't really get families."

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"Well, don't try learning the concept from ours."

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"...Who should I learn it from?"

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"Um. I think my aunts on my mother's side had nice, lovely, normal families who are great examples to learn from."

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"Point them out to me whenever they're around, then."

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"We're estranged. You can't have a nice lovely normal family without being estranged from us, really."

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"...Then I am not sure when I am going to have the opportunity to meet any, although I guess something might come up."

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"Surely some of the planets we visit will have them."

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"Sure. Eventually something will come up, I should I have said."

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"Typical features of healthy families are that the members like and trust each other, are often friends, and can rely on each other in times of need but don't abuse this too heavily."

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"That sounds nice. And this happens most of the time?"

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"More than half the time, in Valinor at least."

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"Huh. How?"

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"You grow up together so you have a lot in common from a young age. People often experience a strong fondness and desire to protect their family members, but even if you don't, you tackle lots of things together and that can make people close."

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"Huh."

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"I knew all my little brothers their whole lives."

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"So why is your family not a nice lovely normal one?"
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"Another criteria of nice lovely normal ones is no mass murders. If you do any of that you're not lovely or nice or normal, even if you're not internally dysfunctional."

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"Permanent disqualification?" she wonders.

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"I think so. You might be able to get back to 'nice' eventually but certainly never 'normal'."

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"I suppose that would be a different matter."

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"If you asked people in normal families they probably also wouldn't say their father had the most important claim on their lives."

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"Who usually holds the position?"

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"Uh, the person themself. Maybe their children. Maybe a husband or wife."

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Nod, nod. "This all seems very complicated and may be more trouble than it's worth."

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"Functional or dysfunctional I know of very few people with families who would agree with you. Are - things associated culturally with mortals low-status in your society? The way you talk about them..."

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"Um, depends on what you mean. Having a mortal in a court is actually a status symbol because they're hard to get and maintain. The cultural stuff is mostly considered incomprehensible more than anything; I don't think people would look down on a fairy who studied them, every now and then a fairy wanders in the mortal world and gets stuck and that's rotten luck but not particularly low status..."

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"I mean, like, having parents, speaking languages..."

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"Breeder fairies are low status compared to spontaneous kinds," she says. "They have worse kind magic on average and start vassaled to whoever names them, so any given one you meet is probably low-ranked within their own court unless you get the ancestor. Languages are just weird; somebody might have a hobby of learning them and that wouldn't be lower-status than having a hobby of copying art books or weaving grass."

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"I see," he says, "fair enough."

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"I don't mean to be condescending or anything, have I been?"

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"I appreciate that you stopped calling us mortals."

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"Well, you're correct that you did recently get lots less mortal."

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"Removing a layer of bureaucracy on the reembodiment process is not the relevant distinction here."

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"Why did you even call it 'dying', then?"

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"When we invented our language, mortals didn't even exist. Dying referred to having your body destroyed."

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"Oh."

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"The mortals only came after the rising of the Sun."

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"You didn't have a sun before?"

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"Nope! Trees in Valinor, dark everywhere else. We are fond of the stars, and tolerate the Sun."

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"It'd be very weird in Fairyland for a night place to suddenly become a day-cycle place and stay that way. I guess it could happen."

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"The Valar did it."

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"Why?"

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"The Enemy's servants hated the light. And the new lights were remnants of the destroyed Trees."

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"Why didn't they like light?"

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"I suppose we should have asked when we had the chance. Sensitive eyes, maybe."

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"There's some fairy kinds that prefer the dark, but their night places do not usually stop being night places on them."

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"Fairyland has a redeeming trait," he says.

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"It's also beautiful, you agreed it was beautiful."

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"And it sent us you," he agrees. "Good things come in threes."

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"Do they?"

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"Silmarils come in threes. There are three tribes of the Elves. Kinslayings there were two of. I was captured by the Enemy twice."

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"...is this Eru being Eru or something else?"

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"Probably Eru being Eru. He also likes sevens."

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"What comes in sevens?"

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"Seven sons of Fëanor. Seven times Nolofinwë was crushed to the ground by the Enemy's shield and rose again to keep fighting. Seven Dwarf kingdoms."

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"I don't think Fairyland has any patterns like that."

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"Your creator seems more hands-off."

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"To the point where it is not remotely obvious they exist unless you have particular preconceptions about what things require invention," Promise says.

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"Fairyland definitely requires invention."

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"What would convince you that it didn't have any?"

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"Discovering the processes that underlie it, and them turning out to be much simpler than we currently think they have to be; discovering other worlds in the process of becoming Fairylands, or that once were; understanding the universe well enough to build my own, and seeing a Fairyland crop up without intervention on my part."

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"Then I suppose you will probably expect it to have been created for a long time. Do you suppose this should give us pause trying to take it over?"

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"My world has gods. Long ago I decided I didn't much care what they wanted."

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"Turned out to matter some recently."

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"I suppose so. Whoever created Fairyland presumably made sure their name didn't work by its rules."

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"It'd be a major oversight otherwise. Although Eru didn't patch it as soon as I showed up."

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"Eru is very confusing to me," he says mildly.

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"He's... yes, confusing."

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"The Valar I understand better, I spent longer trying. He is less like them than I'd have guessed."

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"What are they like? I didn't talk to Ulmo very much."

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"Very unlike us, but trying to be. Very willing to communicate, but stubborn when they can't afford to be, and very, very slow."

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"Huh. Yeah, that's different from Eru all right."

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"They also told us he cared about a lot of things he doesn't seem to particularly care about at all."

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"Like what?"

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"Like romantic entanglements being between men and women only - he seems to actually care a lot more about good stories..."

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"Maybe he thinks it's a good story if people have obstacles to their romantic entanglements, I bet that's it."

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"...oh. I bet that is.

How pathetically small."
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"Yeah."

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I guess we really can't throw him in a black hole, can we.

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I'm not sure if it would work, since he can apparently just make them. Also it is possible his existence sustains this universe.

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Could've ordered him to swear to be less of - well. But I don't think it would have been wise to take a chance on something like that.

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Would oaths even work on him?

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I'm not sure. I'd expect them to. If you're not reckless, you know, they're an advantage - you can be truthworthy when it's needed, you can swear never to swear another oath if you decide you'd rather not have them at all.

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And then a fairy comes along. And we don't even know if fairy orders can command oaths in a way that works.

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That's true. But if I'd sworn never to swear another oath you definitely couldn't make me swear one even under fairy orders. You can delay doing something you're sworn to do if it's a discrete sort of thing with no specified timeframe but you can't do something you swore not to. Physical can't.

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Huh. I'm really curious about the interaction but there's no way to test it at all now and probably wouldn't have been any ethical way to test it before.

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Oaths with limited duration. I thought of some tests but decided not to chance them, and now everyone who has Oaths can't do orders.

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Oh well.

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What are your goals for the next two hundred years? We all have a lot to cope with and have been in some cases dead for a very long time, and there's all this new physics to learn. I think we'll be happy making the city beautiful and apologizing to people who stop by to ask for that and designing the planet we'll settle once we can gate out.

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I want to learn more magic music and stop finding nonfairies so confusing and make sure I write down what I've learned about sorcery in the last fifty years because the notes in my tree won't go that far and I don't want to forget while I can't practice and I want to learn science.

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Great. All of those things are very workable.

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Good.

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The city grows tall and spectacular; there are classes taught on algorithms and electricity that reluctantly attract even people with very serious grievances with the house of Fëanor. Fëanor flits around trying to invent a harmonics stabilizer and teach all the algorithms classes. Macalaurë teaches her all the magic symphonies he knows and composes some new ones and works with Curufinwë on a high-fidelity sound recorder. Anyone she asks will teach her science.

It's only a century later that Fëanor has gating to Fairyland sorted. Everyone is not quite ready.
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...well, do they want her to wait?

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No. That would be ridiculous. They need to go and fix Fairyland, don't they?

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So she makes a gate and waits for it to settle.

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Bye bye! says Eru happily. Oh, this story's going to be lovely.

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...

I'll see what I can do, she agrees, and she goes at last to her tree.