...what, is she supposed to just leave it? It'd be ridiculous by now if she just left it, grows like bamboo.

,..weird.

Is this not how their hair works, she hasn't been paying attention.

They stop growing it at their preferred length. And cutting it would be kind of like cutting off your fingertips or something. Except more - intimate. Has she seen any Elves with short hair except the King's consort.

She did notice they otherwise all kept it long but didn't realize they never had to trim it. Hair's not an intimate thing on her world at all and lots of people have it short. Her mama used to insist that she keep it long because it's the same as her dad's and her mama was kind of neurotic about that because Vampires With Dead Mates, Or Who Think Their Mates Are Dead. Werewolves have to have short hair or they will be incapacitatingly shaggy in wolf form! Like so! This even though the source culture of the original werewolves was pretty fond of long hair as a thing before the Volturi massacred it and it became basically Werewolf Culture instead. And half-vampire hair just grows really really fast.

Oooh, fascinating. Elves consider hair intimate and almost invariably keep it very long, you also use braids to signify things. You might trim an animal's hair, but never a person's.

Interesting Hair Facts. Noted. Well, Elspeth is averse to dragging thirty feet of hair around so she cuts it when it gets to the floor, sometimes sooner, but she's not doing it to be weird. And she just braids it to keep it out of the way but it's convenient that this has also avoided scandalizing Elves.

They'll try to not act like it's weird, then.

That's very nice of them.

They try a plane. It is shot down; the bomb doesn't detonate. The very frustrated King calls a meeting to discuss alternate delivery mechanisms.

Missiles are an option but can also be potentially shot down.

And it's not as if they have enough uranium to try dozens at once, unless most of them are decoys.

And they don't have Razi or anybody like that. Are there local magic things that might help?

Local magic has mostly local effects. They can armor a plane, though enchanting that much metal in a way intended to withstand whatever the Enemy's firing at it will take the better part of a year.

Why does it take that long?

"The short version is that enchanting metal involves coming up with a long sequence of instructions, converting them into a format that metal can, ah, interpret, and then reading them out to the metal over osanwe in such a way that the echoes land on the desired effect. If you make mistakes you have to start over. Instructions tend to take a long time and instructions for magic intended to contest other magic will be complicated."

Hm.

Does it have to be osanwë in particular?

Does she want to try doing a simple enchantment to make stone glow using her form of truth-communication?

Sure.

It's not exactly such a simple experiment; she has to learn the enchantment, and even if she picks up the notation quickly it's long.

She can read fast.

Great. Here's how you'd read out an enchantment to make a rock glow.

Elspeth can talk to anything that can listen. She doesn't usually expect rocks to listen, but if this one can it should hear her.

And if she sends it the whole of the complicated enchantment, it'll start glowing.

So she may be able to save them some time and the risk of loss of fidelity with enchanting airplanes.