Is that likely to change if I provide you with suitably shown-true information about the Enemy, and promise only to use weapons you give us against him?

Maybe if the promise was really airtight.

You might have to learn our language, or really trust at least one person who speaks it, to be satisfied with the wording of such a promise. But if that's a promising avenue then I want to tell you about the Enemy. Is now a good time, or are you still acclimating to around here?

She totally wants to learn the language, it shouldn't take her long, she has a perfect memory. Now seems fine, she wasn't doing much active acclimation before.

Language first, or Enemy first?

There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason they couldn't happen simultaneously what with the telepathy.

"Okay." He translates while he speaks. "Did Irisse tell you about the Valar and the Maiar? They existed before the world itself and they tell us that they created it. One of them is named Melkor and he destroyed what the others created, but at the time the world had no people except the other, also indestructible, Valar and Maiar on it so this was as I understand it not a very big problem.

Melkor'd messed up the major continents tremendously and there was very little alive on them except his monsters and the things his monsters ate, and the other Valar got tired of working with him and retreated to Valinor, which they built to their precise preferences. It's exceptionally pretty. " He sends memories.

"It is pretty," she agrees in a fairly precise copy of his accent.

"Oh, you might be as fast with languages as my father! I never imagined that was possible."

Did he have an eidetic memory?

"No, just a very very good one and a passion for languages and lots of knowledge of syntax generalizations across languages so he could make inferences quickly."

"I have lots of languages," but I haven't considered linguistics per se very much.

"If that brain dump turns out not to be fatal to us I expect he'd be very sad he couldn't get it on purpose."

Some people did want it on purpose. It does contain a lot of genuinely personal information, some about people who are still alive and aren't as cavalier as I am about mindreading, so I'm not casual about it now that I'm not trying to take over the world. I got all the languages out of it, though.

"Well, my father is dead, so it's not really possible to teach him the languages. Maybe someday."

Elspeth nods. She can resurrect dead people but only with a combination of human (?) sacrifice and the person to be resurrected having been a vampire who Aro or Addy downloaded at some point, no point there.

"The Valar can resurrect dead people. Possiby not if you overwrote them with memories, but certainly if they died as my father did."

It's a pity that the people she blasted could have been okay if she hadn't done that even if Aredhel had stabbed them anyway, but she hadn't been going in assuming that this was an option in the first place. Her memory-overwriting is the only method for it at home and she didn't know the Valar could do that.

"Yeah, I can't imagine how you would have, and it doesn't sound like the two of you used it needlessly anyway. The Valar might be able to help them anyway, I am not at all sure it's beyond them. Unfortunately we can't take our world's method of resurrection to your world even if we find a way to send you back. The Valar don't do mortals - our humanlike people."

"Don't or can't?"

"They would say 'can't'. I'm not actually sure."

Well, Aro's dead, no way to back them up now even if Addy and a bandolier of witch toes shows up with perfected interworld travel in the next five minutes.

"I think our world's magic can fix immortality, but it'd be a centuries-long project for anyone who isn't my father and I have the engineers working on the war instead."

Mama's trying to make everyone at home immortal but has to balance that against blood supply and not disrupting literally all the cultures in the world and turning into a vampire hurting like crazy so it's time-consuming to roll out. The synthetics still taste awful.

"I doubt our solution will have any of those drawbacks, though it also won't come with the benefits of being a vampire, and it won't be ready in time for anyone currently alive unless you decide to win me the war after all."