Once she has emitted all her relevant airplane knowledge Elspeth idly considers bringing this place up to higher technological standards in other ways. She could probably improve their farming yields or something. Might be best saved for postwar? Unsure.

"It'd mostly benefit the Men; it's hard to feed them enough, their population keeps growing. We currently use a lot of magic songs. If you have anything that'd work well with that, or work much better than that, we'd adopt it."

Elspeth doesn't expect magic songs to interact much with combine harvesters or fertilizer. This may or may not be a result of her not knowing much about magic songs. Should she?

There are all kinds and they can do all kinds of things, though speeding or tweaking existing processes is really their strength. They make crops grow faster. They'll have nothing to say about combine harvesters or fertilizer.

So she explains combine harvesters and fertilizers and such things. Elspeth is vaguely curious to hear a magic song, mostly because Addy will be really annoying if she shows up and Elspeth can't just blast complete magic song related information at her.

"It is in any event past time I introduced you to my brother."

And he has him summoned. Can he do a concert of all magic songs? He'd be delighted.

He does a concert of magic songs. Faster reflexes, greater strength, amplified range, blindness, deafness, sudden imperviousness to physical attack, heightened perception, wind, rain, sun, heat, cold -

The songs are pretty and Elspeth memorizes them all.

He is glad of it! If Elspeth finds a way back to her world it'll be good for it to have magic songs. 

Yep! They're really bottlenecked on most of their magic. Elspeth's useful but nonessential; it would be much harder to do without, say, Alec. Do they have a painkiller song, the Golden Empire would like a painkiller song if it could actually work on turning.

Not at the moment. He can try composing one after the war. Right now he's working on a radiation shield song so they can go get the Silmarils as soon as Angband falls instead of waiting for the area to be safe.

...interesting priority.

She's the one who held up nukes over Maitimo's fucked up relationship with his boyfriend, isn't she.

If that's how you want to put it.

No one on any side of this can be said to be using math to set their priorities, is all.

Technically the fucked up relationship part only took an extra couple minutes and the real delay was her being sufficiently confident that Maitimo would not be horribly irresponsible with the nukes themselves in light of the fact that he had previously demonstrated himself untrustworthy via withholding fucked-up-relationship-related information. Anyway, it's not like a painkiller song is urgent with no way to transmit it home.

Okay, fair enough. Well, radiation shielding now, painkilling songs for her after the war. Thank you for the nukes, by the way, likely speeded the end of this war by several centuries.

They're welcome.

They run a kingdom together. After a few months Findekáno tests him. Kneels beside his bed and watches Maitimo break into a radiant smile, lets Maitimo undress him and pull him into bed, and then says - "actually, I don't think I want to, tonight."

Maitimo's hands go still. 

"Sorry. maybe some other time."

"You're testing me."

"Yeah."

Maitimo considers whether Findekáno will leave him forever if he fails the test.

"Why are you so bad at this?" Findekáno murmurs, watching him. He's not afraid, though. "I don't plan to tell anyone, I don't expect to alter my future behavior because I'm not making choices in general based on any assumptions that'll be shaken if you decide not to let me go tonight. You cannot win me back in a deeper sense than you have and you won't mess our current arrangement up except by ceasing to be an effective aid in running the empire. You have nothing to lose. But I do not want to sleep with you right now, and so I'd like to leave."

"I am so bad at this because I really hate it when you leave."

Findekáno stands up. The oath not to raise a hand to his king makes it not much of a fight, whenever they disagree about where Findekáno ought to be. Maitimo doesn't grab him. He curls up in bed. 

He leaves. 

He's not sure if that's character growth but it sort of seems like it might be. 

Elspeth barely thinks about Maitimo and has no cause to muster more than a flicker of mild revulsion when she does; he needn't hate himself much anymore. She advances agriculture and provides radio to boot.

Elves are enthusiastic about radio. 

All this is making the Enemy nervous. There are minor earthquakes.

...should she stop?

"I don't think so. Most of his impressive capabilities take time to deploy, or he'd have attacked us long ago; he must have noticed we're growing in strength. And he can hardly want us dead any more than he does."

Okay, well, here's what she knows about earthquake-proof structures.

They'll get to work on that. Thank you. Are memory-dumps fatal, because they're so handy it'd be worth being catatonic for a while.