Nod.

He's watching him intently. 

"Maitimo thinks it's a ploy to capture or kill Loki, or possibly merely to make sure Fëanáro's unwilling to work with her. They talk it through for a couple of days, decide they can't verify enough to make the deal, set up an ambush for Sauron at the meeting site instead. Sauron either underestimated her or was trying to take her alive, or he'd have killed her right there. Instead she made it out and he limped back to Angband the Maia equivalent of badly damaged. 

She took over raising the new species of Men from him. We built fortifications and cities. A couple of years passed."

"Speaking as an ex-human good on her taking an interest."

"Sauron spends those years personally fucking with her. Sending her pregnant orcs and orcs holding their infant children for her to murder, stuff like that. Kidnapped a personal friend of hers, tortured the friend until there was nothing left to do, and then sent her home with orders to get Loki to kill her..."

"Okay, 'creep' is apparently an understatement."

"Yeah, people who've met Maitimo don't tend to joke about it. It's okay. Anyway, Loki gets word that the Enemy's going to shatter her little kingdom of Men, and Maitimo's built himself one hell of a defensive bastion of a city, so she moves her Men in there and then some of the Noldor move in there and then Sauron comes in to assail it.

And she murders him. Someone has got to show you the memories. She'd just gotten short-range tactical teleportation and her ice powers worked out and they leave craters in a solid square mile of earth and I think it was the most satisfying moment of any of our lives, up to date. 

And then Fëanáro gets retroactive eidetic memory up and working and they bear down on nukes."

"That explains electricity to nukes in sixteen years! That seemed really ridiculous!"

"They had the help of physics textbooks! It was still pretty ridiculous, they worked their people to exhaustion. But they did it. Tested it in the desert and then Loki teleported it over Angband.

Didn't work. Well, it destroyed the place, but not the Enemy."

Nod.

"So we retrieve the Silmarils, which were weaponizable and usable as radiation shielding, and consolidate population centers so the Silmarils could shield everyone while the Enemy rampaged around destroying most of the world. Except Doriath grabs one Silmaril and refuses to give it back, and Maitimo ends up going in there as their prisoner to try to talk them around to letting us use it.

And we worked. For a decade. Loki and Fëanáro had figured out a ridiculous magic hack so they could think at three or four times normal pace, and they spent all their time in acceleration, barely speaking to anyone else. And when the continent began to crumble to pieces, Loki'd secured permission to take everyone but the Noldor to Valinor where they'd be safe and Maitimo'd secured the third Silmaril and Fëanáro'd worked out how to use all three of them to freeze us all in time so the Enemy couldn't slaughter us and the continent couldn't crumble around us.

And then - well, we spent the next few years in stasis, but in Valinor they begged and pleaded and delayed the Valar's judgment about having mortals stinking up their precious paradise, and Loki finished interdimensional teleportation.

She came here. She found the most powerful weapon this universe had to offer, and she took it up, and she took it back to Arda and smeared Morgoth across the cosmos and then kindly suggested to the other Valar that they reconsider their behavior. Made the planet round. Erased oaths, so all the orcs were free, and got a nice planet for them. Picked out a planet for us, too. 

And now she and Maitimo are off ending some kind of intractable centuries-old war. I guess that's how some people heal."

"I mean, having centuries-old wars around is just tacky."

"Like flat planets. Just itching for someone to apply phenomenal power and a lack of respect for the way the world is.

Now you've got to tell us how you did it."

"It's not a very nice story."

"It was not a very fair fight. We got very lucky."

"So, I'm a demon. Demons are one of three summonable species - doesn't work in this world, checked - we make things, there's also angels who change things and fairies who move things. Random kid in the Noldor host summoned me by accident, doodling on the floor, I figured I'd help as long as I was there, filled out the fleet of lightleaper ships and filled them up with food and stuff. Got the Valar to quarantine the scope of their fucking Doom so it wouldn't apply in other worlds because they hadn't been accounting for that. They also decided to interdict further summoning, so I was it for daeva backup and if anybody killed Random Kid I would've been back home in Hell just like that. So the host went to Endorë and I went off to intergalactic space to make a planet and put Random Kid and some other families there to be out of the way of the action and then met up with everybody at Endorë and made 'em a bunker under the ocean."

".....I have so many things for you to do if you're amenable, I assure you they have a very good lives-saved to time-spent ratio unless you make things very slowly. But do go on."

"Planet takes a few weeks if I start with nothing but a design. I will be happy to make some stuff for you but it can't be magic, smarter than a snail, or antimatter. Anyway. There's a war on. It's - a surprisingly primitive war, considering that while Endorë's incarnates don't have spaceflight mastered the incarnates weren't running the Enemy's side of it. Seems very restrained - it's hell on everyone going through it, to be clear, but the actual weapons deployed are guns and stuff, not nukes. I'm really hesitant to start throwing nukes around first because I have no idea what's holding him back. Later transpires that he thinks the Valar will hold off interfering in anything that looks like a fair fight."

"...or that they figured if it escalates it's an extinction event. All right."

"Elves and orcs are all natural born cyborgs, which is bizarre, they've got chips in their heads that literally develop in the womb that do telepathy and oaths of varying stupidnesses and all sorts of tempting little upgrades and also mental backups - on the chips themselves, if they survive bio-death, and also by instantaneous relay to Mandos. Those are what the Enemy destructively uploads from, is the chips. He's got a lot of people. Offers parley if me and Maitimo show up to it. We figure out a way to leverage my making stuff into verifying that an oath is actually spoken and not illusioned - I can sort of sort by genre, when I'm being an infosec hazard, and Melian helped test that I could use that to distinguish as long as the oath's spoken into a recorder. So we get a nice snug oath out of him, we show up, Sauron shows up, he's a total creep, he makes us offers.

Wants me to suck Valinor into a black hole."

"I am not surprised. Same offer - orcs don't suffer -"

"Evac privileges," says Cam, shaking his head. "Could've had a year to herd everybody onto ships and gotten them somewhere he'd never find them... Didn't take it. Maitimo was offered a cessation of upload torture in exchange for his," incline of head to Fëanáro, "help figuring out how to redirect backups from Mandos, which, I do not say this out of any fondness for Mandos but no."

"Oh, Eru, that'd be bad."

"Yeah. So we don't take the deals, we leave, I run around installing fancy suicide thingies in everybody who'll take one so they can melt their chips at will -

- doesn't help when a whole city dies in their sleep of one of the fucking custom bioweapons, that's when he got Maitimo, he was there."

He flinches.

"Then the you, there was only the one at the time, figures out resurrection. Demons can't make minds. I can make bodies, live as you please, and they have insect-level cognition. Same limit applied to chips. But on the chips - the data was all there when I made one, it just didn't work for inscrutable magic reasons if I tried to build a body around it - your alt figured out under extremely restrictive demon-safe information handling protocols how to read and write to chips. So if I made a copy of a chip at a time and a blank, the data could come off the one and print nonmagically onto the other - put a body around that - good as new. Had a Maitimo again for various Maitimo-related functions.

"And had several million fewer reasons not to destroy Valinor."