"Not even a planet. It was flat. The Valar held it that way with magic, they hadn't thought of doing a round one. This offended Loki's sensibilities and it's round now. Valinor and Endore were separate continents, though, and you had invented writing fairly recently and we were a long ways from spaceships."

"This Loki person sounds really interesting."

"There's a reason I bet you a Silmaril you weren't the most interesting person I'd met. And I don't know if I'm Fëanáro's kin enough to be offering the damned things - did you also swear a really stupid oath -"

"I also swore an oath."

"Anyhow, after our Fëanáro'd burned the boats and stranded us all in terrible conditions with few supplies in the freezing arctic, we decided to walk across it. It was ugly. About twelve thousand people died. And when we were nearing the edge of our march, a woman appears out of nowhere in the snow, and we establish in short order that she is from a different dimension, did not mean to be there, has healing powers which could rapidly save a lot of our lives, had illusion and invisibility powers with a range of 'as she pleased', and could touch people and turn them into birds."

"That is a sorta weird power set."

"Her powers let her do anything she wants! Those happened to be the first spells she'd used them to design, because the design process takes decades and she was from a planet where women face serious social sanction for using magic, and she was a princess and would have lost her chance at the throne, and had in fact just been banished for using her healing spells to save her father's life."

"...wow, okay. Maybe we are not the most interesting visitors you have had in all forever. Depends on how much interestingness bonus you assign to the alts thing. I have one here too but his was easier to triangulate so we're here first."

"The alts thing is pretty exciting. I want to meet all, ah, four of me, it'd be nice to be able to get more done." He's surprised Maitimo hasn't convinced his alternate self to make more than four but he's not going to accidentally out the other Maitimo to his father if they didn't meet a Loki and get encouraged to get married. 

"But Loki's more exciting. So, at this point we aren't sure if the other host bona fide wants us dead or just wanted us out of the way, and therefore how they'd react to our arrival alive. We were sort of expecting it to come to a fight, honestly. I tell Loki to go find my cousin Maitimo - you have him? - and see if he could be leveraged to get his family to not try to murder us all. So she turns into a bird and goes off to meet you -" to Fëanáro. "And apparently become fast friends.

Maitimo wasn't there. He'd been taken prisoner by the Enemy."

"Five, there's one of you in the other world we found too," Cam mentions. "They're all humans there, you guys are more closely matched. Congratulations on eventually getting your Enemy dead, by the by."

"Thank you. ...I'm assuming you also did that?"

"You finish your story first."

"Loki meets Fëanáro, goes 'I don't remember much of my science lessons but I think electricity somehow involves magnets,' three days later he has a generator. By then she's swooped around Beleriand meeting people and learning about the situation and has decided the Enemy really fucking needs to be dead, so she asks him if he can do retroactive eidetic memory, so she can remember her science lessons better and teach us the galaxy's best weaponry. He says that's the most ridiculously impossible thing he's ever heard of, give him a decade. 

Loki sneaks invisibly into Angband and stages a prison break."

"Probably a more satisfying activity in your version."

"...why's that?"

"Ours didn't keep prisoners in a rescuable form so much, he did destructive uploads, spun off copies, had offplanet backups, ran 'em all real fast..."

"I shall have to tell Maitimo that it could've been worse.

It was pretty bad as it stood. He could still do the altered subjective time, and he did hallucinations of being rescued, over and over, until they didn't trust it when it came true."

"Telling him it could've been worse seems insensitive. Besides, the, however many, six or something, of him are all forked off from an instance that doesn't remember it."

Why would there be more of Maitimo? He is pretty sure he can't cover one and a half of Maitimo.

"Well, ours remembers it. It took him twenty-five years to believe that it was really over, though he managed to make himself one hell of a wartime asset while in constant psychological torment. 

Loki talks to some orcs, learned that they're all under oaths to Melkor, works with Fëanáro on some clever oath-reinterpretation so they're safe, bargains with Ulmo to get them an island of their own, a free independent orc colony. She learns that Men have started existing, goes over to meet them, and runs into Sauron."

"Sauron is such a creep."

"Sauron offers her a deal. Orcs, he says, outnumber Elves several thousand to one, and all orcs everywhere are in constant physical pain - she'd earlier verified that. He offers to make it stop."

"He wants her help killing the Valar, in the long run, and as a show of good faith he wants her to give him Maitimo back. He'd gotten attached, see."

"Such a creep."

"Loki goes to Maitimo and asks him if he'd volunteer."