He's happy.

That's better than if he weren't, at least. Cozy, cozy mind control, all Chelsea and no Pyotr. But before she showed up here she never thought she was going to go 'Vampire Default Relationship Styles: A Model Of Consent And Ethics' and now she is kind of doing that and she doesn't have tons of detail on the particular situation that is Lúthien's parents but she doesn't expect to like it.

Well, I don't think they'll care what you think. And they'll need to make this decision.

Okay! Not caring what Elspeth thinks makes the loudness of her thinking it way less relevant.

So they walk through the forest towards Menegroth. Lúthien is thinking aloud about avenues of mind-controlling the evil King, since it still seems like the cleanest solution.

Well, if she thinks of anything that might work, there's way too much mind control flying around by default for Elspeth to go out of her way to protect the evil King in particular from it. Although he's probably listening in on her from here and this has the obvious consequences.

That's annoying, can you not keep him out?

Elspeth's figured out the private thoughts thing in basic form, but she has not had any opportunity to learn to be specific about who she hedges out and suspects her metaphor wouldn't work very well for that use case, and also it's really uncomfortable.

Hi, evil King. I'm trying to think how to stop you. If I pull it off then I'll stop in a couple centuries once the war's won and the empire's stable, and you can see if anyone still cares at all about you without those. 

He'd have a really hard time trading Findekáno anything at that point, wouldn't he. It's not really funny except it sort of is.

It's pretty funny. What's he trading Findekáno now, what is Findekáno like in general?

Findekáno is like so. Nice guy when he isn't sworn to take all the evil King's ends as his own, which is no longer an ongoing concern! Apparently the evil King has been trading him power for sex, which is better than trading him being chained to the wall for sex!

Yup, that's - 

- my parents aren't like that.

That's good, although Elspeth hopes for Lúthien's sake that she doesn't actually know as much about her parents' sex life as Elspeth knows about hers.

Nope. But - it's not that.

That's good.

They reach Menegroth. Menegroth is very pretty. She walks past the guards and into the city. 

Elspeth follows.

Your majesties, this is Princess Elspeth. She has information about the intentions of the Noldor.

She sure does! Here it is! Lúthien has to call her parents 'your majesties'? Elspeth's parents don't even make their subjects call them that and half the ones who do are doing so because they think it's funny.

If that's the capacity in which I'm talking to them, yeah.

The King and Queen frown in sort-of-creepy unison at Elspeth's information about the Noldor. 

Well that's sort of creepy. It is definitely frowny information though.

In your opinion, are there avenues to avoid a war with the Noldor other than permitting some of their engineers into the country to work with all three Silmarils on a weapon against the Enemy?

Short of letting them just leave with the Silmaril? Well, there might be, but she sure hasn't thought of any.

In that case, we will permit ten of them into the borders, if they swear not to do violence to anyone within them and bring the other two Silmarils with them, and swear not to leave with any of the Silmarils and to instead deploy them from here against the Enemy.