Hello. Can I interest you in a beverage? First one's free.

"...Sure. Who are you and why did these doors lead to you, here, instead of my sister in her throne room?"

Please call me Bar. The door to Milliways appropriates other doors in various universes and leads here instead of to wherever the appropriated door normally goes. When you leave you may expect the same time and place whence you came.

"Huh. Any universe? So there are in fact more than two."

Many more than that. Although if there are universes which for whatever reason are Milliways-inaccessible I would have some difficulty learning of them. A mug of hot wine appears, smelling of cinnamon.

She magically checks to make sure it's harmless and then takes a sip. "This is lovely."

Thank you!

"So what do you do besides be stunningly good at drink recommendations?"

I can also do book recommendations and dispense other purchases, and am generally the source of information about the establishment for inquisitive patrons. I dispense room keys and handle in-bar employment.

"Books? Can you--I was in university--"

I have all of the books; which ones would you like?

"Best day. All of them. I want all of the books."

Which do you want first?

"Magic and engineering textbooks from the University of Genosha."

And here they are, stacked up neatly all over the bar's surface leaving a nook for the wine.

The door opens.

Odette turns around.

(She has not sat down, or stood down, or in any way ceased to be hovering a few feet off the floor.)

"Okay," says the newcomer, "this is interesting, where am I?"

"Milliways, apparently, whose main features seem to be a door that hijacks doors in arbitrary universes and a sentient bar who sells at the very least drinks and books but also other things that have not yet been specified."

"And here I thought the Tesseract was bored with me again already. Hello, sentient bar."

Hello. First drink is free. I can sell most medium-sized nonmagical nonweapon nonliving objects.

"The Tesseract?"

"Magic item. It gave me magic powers when I was a kid, and then later flung me into another universe until I managed to use them to get out, grab it, and use it to kill an evil god."

"Spontaneous transposition to other universes can be a bitch," she says sympathetically, "although I'm pretty sure mine didn't involve any artifacts. D'you happen to have it on you and/or tips for killing evil gods without, I've got one of those to deal with myself."

"Nah, I don't usually carry it around when I'm not doing anything that might require it or trying to annoy my mother. We tried a nuke first? Didn't work?"

"What's a nuke?"

"Extremely powerful nonmagical bomb. Flattened his fortress, but he picked up and went around wearing the fallout like a fashion statement."

"Eugh. Well, I had no plans to try anything but magic on mine, so there's that."

"Can't guarantee they all work the same. But I do recommend being sure you can do it before you pull the trigger."

"The trouble is figuring out how to be sure, without pulling the trigger," she sighs.

"Yeah. I killed one of his minions with my bare hands but there was a big jump in necessary lethality so that's not a good indicator."

"The minions of my deity are extremely murderable," she nods.

"And you haven't been murdered back, that's promising."

"People tell me to stay safe sometimes and I promise them that my immediate vicinity will be far more dangerous for servants of the Enemy than for me."

"Heh, I like that."

"Thanks. I think it was--during the Dagor Bragollach, um, that was this battle a little while back, my sister who came with me on my transdimensional accident wanted to know if I was safe and Fingon, this guy, he's a prince and a military officer of some kind, anyway he said he was pretty sure I was, but 'safely fighting literally everything' rather than 'safely behind fortress walls."

"Fingon?"

"We showed up in different places in the new universe following the accident and he's the guy who found her, I ended up nearest one of his cousins, named Maedhros. They were kind of far apart, geographically, we hadn't seen each other in person since the accident at the time."

"These names are familiar."

"Was your evil god named Morgoth."

"One of his excessive number of names, yes."

"Detonating balrogs is fun," she says, the large number of more important things she could say in response to this revelation tripping each other up.

"It is so fun. I only got to do two. Sauron wasn't fun but he was very satisfying."

"Maedhros says he doesn't think I'm ready to fight Sauron," she says wistfully. "I got to do a lot more than two, though, and this enormous dragon-thing." She makes a scale illusion of Glaurung next to some Quendi.

"Wow, I didn't run into any of those."

"When'd you show up?"

"Nolofinwëans were crossing the Ice, I landed right near them."

"Ah."

"Several centuries after that, for me. Seems the time difference gave him some extra R&D leeway."

"Makes sense. - You've got a live Maedhros? A live Maedhros not in Angband?"

"Fingon rescued him. Had to cut off his hand to do it, couldn't get it out of the shackle, I grew it back. You rescued yours?"

"Yeah. Turned him into a bird to get him off the cliff. Took him fucking decades to believe that was real."

"Mine still doesn't."

"Mine didn't until I picked up yet a different magic rock in the same family as the Tesseract and gave all the Elves and orcs free will. That plus the fact that he knew me fairly well and didn't think it was consistent that I could have free-will-dispensing power and still be working for the Enemy added up well enough."

"My magic's transmissible. I--think--he was genuinely happy for a moment, the first time he got it to work. But I have no idea how to fix the underlying problem except 'kill Morgoth and hope that the problem resolves itself at some point in the rest of forever.'"

"Has to be something unmistakable. As it happens 'holding your breath' is - for Elves - that, but you can't just tell him, obviously. So that leaves Eru-themed stuff. Mine briefly entertained the idea of marrying some random person before it occurred to him that it could just be another prisoner."

"And, obviously, me trying to convince him it's real is not evidence that it is."

"Yeah. It gets frustrating. He works around it amazingly well."

"He's fantastically competent or I wouldn't have let him give me orders, in the battle," she agrees.

"After all the everything on my Arda was wrapped up I hired him to help me end the ancestral war between my birth and adoptive planets."

"Fun."

"It is! The Noldor who weren't in Valinor at the time moved to a new planet and they're all really busy and it's great."

"Sucks about the war, though."

"I sort of gave Mandos a stern talking to and got most everybody out. But yes."

"I actually meant the one whose battle-lines you got adopted across," she clarifies.

"Oh, that one. Yes, it's terrible, we're fixing it, my mother's plan was stupid but mostly in the 'it required parenting skills to be reliably pulled off' sense, still left me with an interesting position."

"I'm planning to just steal from Mandos, personally, if he's negotiable with at all I don't see it happening before Morgoth dies and I suspect the theft will be easier for me to pull off than Godslaying."

"Oh, yeah, go for it. I didn't have a convenient way to provide any of the dead people bodies, so I wrung them out of him instead, but if you can do the bodies part, fuck 'im."

"Same magic that regrew Maedhros' hand, writ larger," she explains.

"Marvelous. Don't forget the orcs, if you can do anything about them. It's not their fault."

"I know. I--plan to, but it's not as simple a fix, I'm pretty sure it'll have to wait until at least Morgoth's dead."

"- you might be able to borrow Fëanor's trick for at least some of them - they swear when they're very young, barely able to talk, they don't know what they're saying, and intent matters, I started a - an orc cult, had them repeat the same words assigning the word 'Elf' to mean the ones in Valinor and calling everyone on their continent Quendi instead and 'Melkor' meaning a popularly worshipped probably nonexistent deity from my galaxy - once the Enemy found out he made all the orcs re-swear as adults, didn't work any more, and also orcs are most easily put in a re-swearing mood if you can fix their chronic pain problem, but you could get some of them that way - but - you do have to be careful, they took my favorite cult orc and -"

"I'm sorry."

Sigh. "She's okay now. Mandos coughed her up, she lives on a planetful of free orcs."

"And she believes it?"

"She wasn't released deluded, she was released under conflicting oaths with orders to get me to kill her."

"But then after that I killed Sauron with my bare hands."

"Yeah, I think I have enough motivation for that just from Maedhros. Although I probably can't afford the luxury of melee combat, given how my magic works."

"I did a lot of melee combat and I have melee ice powers. The first time I dueled him I didn't do especially well and I had to run away and Huan took it from there, but Sauron spent a few years holed up in Angband, shattering every time he tried to take material form. Second time I had tactical teleportation. And I was really, really pissed off."

"I'm working on teleportation," she nods, "technically I already have it but I really don't wanna use the version I've got too much. Much as it would be satisfying to put my fist through his face the way my magic works--i.e. not in any way melee-specialized at my level--it would be an unconscionable handicap."

"Dead's more important than satisfyingly dead," nods Loki. "I had to teleport a lot, very fast, and heal myself pretty much constantly, and output a great deal of ice. It was a hell of a fight."

"I plan to persuade the universe directly that he shouldn't ought to exist."

"...that sounds like the sort of methodology that might suddenly cause Eru's opinions to matter."

"That's not exactly how it works," she says, waving a hand. "It's anthropomorphizing too much--to someone back home I would have said 'I plan to persuade Sauron not to exist' but obviously his actual opinions don't matter in the least."

"How's that work?"

"Okay, so my kind of magic is divided into three branches: Sympathy, Effort, and Conquest. In terms of the mental actions of the mage, Sympathy involves persuading reality to be what you want, Effort involves pushing on reality until it does what you want, and Conquest involves commanding reality to be what you want. And all of them have mental side-effects and hurt proportionally to the strength of the magic you're doing. I'm as good as I am because I have fantastic resistance to Sympathy's mental side-effects and am a masochist."

"Ah, interesting. Are you getting more resistant or more masochistic or is something else changing over time that you think you'll be able to persuade Sauron to stop existing later?"

"Neither. Those determine how much power you can stand to wield and how wise it is, not how much you technically have access to, and that does improve over time."

"Gotcha. Interesting system. My spells are written out in a special alphabet and it takes me decades to finish one, but I can design them to do whatever and once I've got them I can use them as much as I like."

"I've only been practicing seriously for seven years and I can already technically teleport, so I think I prefer mine."

"Much faster than mine. Although as a non-masochist I find it pretty handy that it doesn't hurt to cast my spells."

"Yeah, there's that. It's kind of depressing how good Maedhros is at it, really."

Nod.

"That's not most of the reason I mostly hang out around Himlad instead of Himring when I'm in Feanorian territory but it's a little bit of it."

"I didn't have a Himlad."

"Oh, it's Celegorm and Curufin's fortress."

"Everybody's still obliged to pretend to care about Elu's fucking opinion, huh?"

"Oh, he decided to pull that linguistic blackmail bullshit in your world too?"

"Yeah. Fëanor taught me Quenya during it, delightfully subversive, that. I have translation magic that was getting me and I just used that before. Most of 'em reverted to their Quenya names afterward but I slip on a few occasionally, Elves have too many names."

"I'd say 'I wouldn't know, I only got to learn one apiece' but I have in fact managed to finagle finding out a few of their real names."

"The Quenya's prettier, isn't it? And they each have a mothername and a fathername and in many cases also nicknames which seem to usually be derived from whichever name they use less, and it just got to be very silly in my opinion."

"I mean, I don't think that's meaningfully more complicated than a given name and a surname and miscellaneous nicknames."

"I have a given name and a matronymic, which I have stopped using since I found out that its source kidnapped me, and people have taken to calling me Godslayer, but all you actually need to know to be clear on whether I'm being talked about or not is 'Loki'."

"Fair enough, I suppose. The Quenya really is prettier, I think Celegorm's the closest to being as pretty as the original, but I'm friends with him so I might be biased."

"I wound up friendliest with Maedhros of the lot but Celegorm's lovely too." And not gay.

"He is. I like Maedhros fine but--well, Thingol can't catch me here--Tyelcormo's good for me to be around. He says things that actually help when I'm having a frustrated episode and he nags me into eating enough and getting enough sleep when I'm too focused on magic and he's--lovely, on a personality level." And so fucking pretty.

"You've been warned about the weird soul thing, right?"

"Fuck, was I being obvious again? Anyway, it doesn't happen with humans, there's been empirical evidence of this. Relatedly, there's been empirical evidence that it's possible for elves to have accidental children with non-elf species, you might want to warn yours about that."

"Will do." She appears an illusory notebook and makes a note and tucks it away again. "Just enough that I thought I'd check. My Elves don't oaths anymore so it's not a thing except for anybody who very urgently wanted them back - I can do individual reversals of the free will thing but it hurts, can't keep it up long enough to go through the whole population."

"Huh. Anyway, yeah, I have kind of a massive crush on him, I think he genuinely likes me and I think it's possible that he might like me like me but I don't really have time for romance right now what with needing to do as much magic as possible in order to get strong enough to kill Morgoth, and there are a bunch of people who dislike the Feanorians enough that they wouldn't trust me if I ended up involved with one like that, so it's not--really on the menu, right now."

"Pity, he's good in bed."

"It would be a violation of his privacy and unbehoovingly voyeuristic to ask for more detail than that," she says, more to herself than Loki.

Loki giggles. "And Elf hair is very soft."

"Andreth said that too," she sighs, "and then he mentioned that platonic hairpetting is sometimes a thing and I was so tempted to ask but it wouldn't actually have been platonic so I'd have been taking advantage."

"Unless something has changed by the time you showed up he does go for casual sex... I didn't touch any male Elves until the oaths were out of the picture but that was me being paranoid."

"I don't want to have casual sex with someone I'm half in love with, that seems bound to end messily. And, of course, if anyone found out we're back to the 'if anyone knew I was sleeping with a Feanorian' problem."

"Pity."

"It's not that bad. I mean, the situation as it stands is 'not until Morgoth's dead' not 'no, never'--at least in terms of talking to him about it, the not considering a fantastic lay worth a broken heart part is still in effect if it turns out he was never more than physically attracted to me."

Nod. "D'you have a timeline? What's your limiting factor on speed?"

"My speed? As fast as I can push myself and still muffle the sonic boom, usually. Faster if I'm in a hurry. I don't have a very complete timeline."

"I mean your getting-stronger speed, not your airspeed."

"Oh. It's kind of hard to measure and there aren't units for it but I got from zero to where I am in seven years--I can fly faster than the speed of sound, regrow limbs, conjure mass directly, I have a range of a few hundred miles, limiting factor is mostly a combination of power level and focus."

"Still not what I was asking - what factors could be altered to get you stronger faster."

"...Focus is the salient thing in what I said there, it's basically a combination of how--persuasive or stubborn or commanding--you're being with how much attention you're paying to the task. Something that expanded my attentional capacity or sped up my thinking or otherwise gave me more brain to magic with would be the most effective thing."

"Have you tried Macalaurë's perception pseedup?"

"During the Bragollach. I got the impression that he was too busy commanding a fortress to do that all the time, though...and it's possible I still haven't trained myself out of the mental habits I had before the stakes were this high."

"You don't have to monopolize him," Loki says, and she goes and asks Bar for a divided little box and two rocks and then she puts the rocks in the box and hands it over. "I can do persistently looping audio illusions. There's the song sped way up, twice, in a soundproof box. You can stack it if you put them exactly the right distance away from each other -" She asks Bar for a string of a certain length. "Warning, though, exiting the effect of the stacked version will make you seasick and headachey and generally not super pleased about this development for a while. You've got to chunk it up, and you won't be able to hold a synchronous conversation with anyone who isn't also sped up. But if you can work in an acoustically enclosed space, you can now do it three times as fast if the work's all cognitive."

...Wow.

"Thank you--I bet I can patch at least some of the side-effects with my magic--the effort's mental, but it has physical effects, will that affect anything? Is that string the length the edges should be apart, or the centers? What do you mean by chunk it up?"

"Centers, but you've got a little leeway. All physical things happen at sidereal speed. And I mean I used to spend subjective months at a time squirreled away in speedup working on my spell to get out of the universe, to avoid having too many occasions of the seasickness thing - I could sort of function through it, had to once when Morgoth threw a rock at Himring and I had to teleport it to the Helcaraxë, but it's not the sort of thing you want to do every week. Unless your magic is better than my healing spells at getting rid of the aftereffects. I'll make you some backups, Maiar can fuck with my illusions and I won't be handy to replace them -" Boxes, rocks.

"I will keep them in my sister's heavily-warded-against-Maiar city."

"I've got lots of songs I can attach to rocks - or whatever - for you, although some of them I accepted under copy protection agreements. The copy protection agreement on that one in particular is that anyone using it for the war effort can have as many as they like, though."

"That is a sensible agreement. If that's the case I should probably bring at--at least one instance to Curufin at least, other people too he's just the first one off the top of my head..."

"I will enchant you all the rocks you like."

She glances at the books and giggles. "When I leave here I'm going to have so much useful stuff to haul out."

"What's the small library for?"

"I'm teaching everyone I can magic and for people who don't have the pain tolerance and resistance to do arbitrary magic within their capacity there's a lot of ways to use magic efficiently," she gestures at the magic books, "that gets taught in places like the University I attended before my accident. These are textbooks. Also some engineering textbooks because my world has stuff theirs doesn't."

"Okay. Do be careful escalating on the weapons tech, I don't know what you've got but nukes do not do it."

"Weapons-wise we have, like, cannons and tanks, for dealing with orcs and maybe balrogs and dragons-if-there-are-any-more if we're lucky. Most of the stuff I'm looking at is, like, quality of life stuff, printing presses sewing machines chemical lights agricultural equipment etcetera, my sister's an engineering student so we were going to get most of this stuff already but speeding it up can't hurt."

"Yeah, that's probably fine."

"What even is a nuke, besides a really big bomb?"

"D'you know what radiation is?"

"Yeah?"

"It is a very big very radioactive bomb."

"Yikes."

"Yeah, I was really surprised when he got up again after that."

She snorts. "So dropping rocks on Angband sure as hell wasn't going to do the trick even if he didn't start turning them into sand when they got large and/or fast enough to make the architecture unhappy."

"Well, you could do some structural damage, put some prisoners out of their misery, but yeah, that's not gonna get the evil god dead."

"Yeah. I mean, I'm probably going to need to get strong enough to just delete him from existence regardless, I'm pretty sure ripping the Doom out of the fabric of reality's going to be harder than that."

"I'm trying to think if there's a way for me to just pop in and do it for you, but I don't know how this place works or if your world's teleportation-accessible or what."

"Well, the Bar's sentient and communicates by napkin, you could ask her." She levitates several stacks of books off the bar to make room.

Loki consults Bar.

Eventually:

"I can't leave the bar for my world to fetch anything or anyone without the door closing and losing me access to the place. Bar doesn't know if I can teleport to your world or not from mine, but Milliways itself will not cooperate with the spell."

"That's annoying. Is there anyone in earshot of where you came in?"

"No, not even if I break out the earsplitting audio illusions."

"Annoying. I could hold the door open and you could lean into my world to see if the teleporting works," she suggests.

"Bar thinks this may not work because time's paused in my world but that it's safe to try."

Odette goes over to the door and opens it.

Loki steps out and -

"Nope, can't get home from here."

"Damn."

"Yeah, sorry."

"Not your fault," she sighs. "...I'm half tempted to suggest that I could hold the door for a while while you went and killed Sauron in melee combat but that's probably a terrible idea on many levels."

"I'm tempted but it was actually kinda close and this Sauron may have tricks I don't expect."

"And he's likely to be in Angband right now."

"And I can't teleport to people, only places, I designed the spell kind of hastily and haven't edited that in yet, so I'd have to find him even to teleport him out to some more neutral battlefield."

"...How confident are you in your ability to be in Angband for a few moments without getting killed or worse?"

"...Haven't tried it. I'd be a surprise but it's a Vala's turf and he's probably got good reaction time. I'm not invulnerable."

"Yeah. Worth asking. Considering. Prisoners."

"Yep."

"I didn't even know it was possible to hate someone so much, before I met Maedhros."

"After the first time I fought him an approximately-neutral Maia called Thuringwethil said that when he tried to take form -" Illusion. A wolf taking a step, shattering to bits. "For several years."

"...Morgoth?"

"Sauron. I dueled him twice and had to fly away the first time, but he wasn't in great shape afterwards. D'you want to see the fight where I killed him?"

"Yes, please."

Visual aids! Cinematic perspectives donated to her eidetic memory by Elf-eyed supervision! Sauron getting his ass kicked!

It's beautiful. Odette is enthralled.

And finally Illusion Loki, armor half slagged but in otherwise perfect health, pops out of a fissure as it snaps closed and the battlefield is still.

Odette bursts into applause. "That was amazing!"

Loki takes a little bow. "Thank you. Maedhros threw me a party, there were werewolf popsicles."

She laughs.

"Pity you're not an Elf, it just occurred to me I could - I suppose I still could, it would just be even more tedious without osanwë -"

She taps beside her glowing silver eyes. I can copy desirable elf-attributes if I want.

"Oh, nice! Osanwë was so great once it was explained to me how to keep private thoughts - okay, so I have this eidetic memory necklace, which unlike the Tesseract I do bring everywhere. My spells can be used by other people; the problem is other people will not naturally remember them or find them meaningful. Eidetic memory solves the first problem. If you want to sit here for a week being really bored I can dump all my spells in your head and send you off with my necklace, I can get another one."

"Sitting here for a week being bored sounds ironically incredibly appealing! I can give you osanwe too, if you want, I did for my sister."

"Is it also a learning curve to avoid involuntarily listening to people, or is that as pure upside as it sounds?"

"I've never had a problem with it."

"Then I would be delighted, I got so used to being able to fling ideas and images at people that it was weird going home and not being able to do the same with my sister. This even though I knew intellectually that it was an Elf thing."

"I haven't been handing it out willy-nilly because, again, listening thing--even if it's not hard I'd still have to, you know, trust they wouldn't do it on purpose--but it's really, really great."

"I am definitely not going to go around reading people's minds without permission."

"I didn't think so or I wouldn't have offered."

"Do I need to do anything...?"

"Nah." Run over the necessary factors compose action suggest--"done."

Thanks!

You're welcome!

Okay, so my spells are one for grace, a suite of them that do jointly comprehensive healing, the illusions - if you've got Elf eyes that'll help a lot, it's mental-image-based, mine looked all fake without ultraviolet and infrared until I got a pair of magic goggles - turning people into birds, and teleportation, which now goes interdimensionally. You probably don't need the grace one, although I'll throw it in if you've got a use; I only invented it because I was really clumsy as a kid and for cultural reasons needed to learn to handle sharp objects. Hopefully they can reverse-engineer the eidetic memory necklace, and I don't know how long that will take in the presumable absence of a live Fëanor but maybe Curufin can do it. You will have to wear it to remember the spells, but it is retroactive so if you take it off for a bit you'll have them again when you put it back on, but while there's only one you won't be able to remember the concepts to transfer them at the same time as someone else can remember them to absorb them. The spells I can give you as written copies, though reading them is much slower, but the learning to understand the symbols part requires osanwë.

I can actually duplicate magic items, limited by complexity, but I suspect this is prohibitively complex for now. I don't personally need the grace one but if we're only going to meet the once and I'll be able to distribute them at some point I'll take it in case I meet someone who does.

Yeah, seems wise. I didn't wind up gracing anybody except like a few random Men - how are your Men doing? - but you may have different applications. She takes her necklace off, gives an odd shiver, and hands it over.

She puts it on. Well, my sister ended up founding a human kingdom because most of the humans were elf vassals and this was problematic. Also, um, be careful of Finrod, in my world he did this thing--she explains the Beor situation.

Oh dear. I don't think he'll have a chance to do that in my version. When I found the Men they were three weeks old - they had a language and they could gather food and such but they were just - they were so completely new - and Sauron was fucking with them, that's when I first fought him, and when he was gone I moved into his house and sort of adopted the species because their Elf neighbors didn't want anything to do with them and Eru does not know how to take reasonable care of his toys. I had a few Elves along for logistics help, osanwë relays, better eyes, etcetera, but I was very clear on the "defenders and consultants not rulers" thing. But I'm glad Finrod's faction was not the one I wound up taking with me, anyway, it was proposed, he was so terribly curious about Men... He's very friendly, donated me some songs, I wouldn't have expected it though I'm not astonished.

I haven't personally met him yet. Oh, if you end up with an Andreth--she sends the face and a scattering of memories of her, including the one where she admitted to having a massive crush on an elf--and she and your Aegnor fall in love, please try to discourage him from being an ENORMOUS TEENAGER about it.

I'm not well-acquainted with Aegnor and I'd be surprised if Men who knew in the first few months of their existence where babies come from and got actual birth control before their second generation was fully grown have the same descendants that far along, but, uh, noted.

I don't think it's particularly likely, but it's also possible that he'd fall in love with a different human woman and be an enormous teenager about her. Although introducing birth control might prevent him from deciding that obviously she wants kids so he should leave her so she can have children with someone who isn't a species that never has children in wartime.

Also mine aren't so much in wartime, although the Noldorin faction are somewhat unsure if the existence of places they haven't brought up to post-scarcity-utopia levels counts. But yes, I'll warn Aegnor about his counterpart.

Oh, right. Anyway, this was particularly ridiculous because Elf Hypermonogamy had apparently already kicked in.

Only some of them are that hypermonogamous. I said I didn't touch a male Elf until they had free will.

Fair enough. Although the fact that there exist non-hypermonogamous elves doesn't make the fact that he left less ridiculous considering that he at least thought he wasn't one of them. Said something about pining in Mandos forever.

Yeah, that's just dumb.

Like I said, he was being an extreme teenager about the whole thing.

I'll tell him. Anybody else I should warn about their character flaws?

I haven't actually met all that many elves such that I'm a good source of that kind of advice, and I think that's all the warnings people have given me--I mean, aside from, like, arbitrary cultural issues--except Thingol, but I can't imagine warning him to be less of a dick is going to go over well and he's already tried pulling the linguistic blackmail, so.

I will be perfectly delighted never to interact with Thingol again.

Any tips?

He's not bright enough to reliably notice if you're passive-aggressive but you shouldn't overdo it? Lúthien's a sweetheart but overprotected and unless something's changed recently not in a position of power, but she's good for figuring out how to word things for best results with her parents.

That could be very useful, thanks.

Lúthien would probably also really like to learn your magic but if her parents have the slightest inkling that it might be dangerous they won't want to let her.

Well, I don't have to ask them first.

She might ask them. Depends on how much growing up she's had a chance to do. And I don't know how much you're currently obliged to pretend you care what Thingol thinks.

Wryly: Well, I'm not planning to use the phrase "linguistic blackmail" to his face.

I told them that with my translation magic I can't reliably identify what languages people are speaking to me, and they said that I should just tell everyone I interacted with not to use Quenya, it was the stupidest thing. - Okay, not the stupidest thing, the stupidest thing is how the planet was flat. Yours presumably is still flat.

Yeah, and apparently the sun isn't much farther away than Valinor.

Well, it's not a regular sun, it's some Maia and a tree bit. But yeah the cosmology is very silly.

...A tree bit?

Fruit of Laurelin. Presumably with some magic tweaks to make it serviceable.

Ooh. You know what my magic is really, really good at making more of? Organic stuff.

The Trees were not as I understand it the most organic of trees, but that could be interesting. Enemy-bait, maybe.

And possibly a weapon, if I can contain it well enough--if it's serviceable as a sun at all, it's got to be really, really hot and bright.

Maybe. I don't know many details about the fruit-to-sun conversion process but the Trees did stand whole on solid ground without melting it.

And everyone seems to think Morgoth'd blot out the sun if he could, so that's one reason to think having there be more of it would displease him in ways pleasing to everyone else.

Yeah, it might be a useful angle.

I'll talk to some people, see what they think.

Oh, also, don't go to the edges of the stupid flat planet, they're all fucked up.

Fucked up like how?

They had to do a patch job on the gravity for the planet to be flat and it's only really functional away from the edge. I never actually went and investigated but it's dangerous - might be okay if you brought a friendly Maia or something.

I'd probably be okay anyway, she says, looking at her still-not-on-the-floor feet.

Maybe, depends how it interacts, but the failure mode is 'attract attention of whoever's minding the safeties, or get flung into a vacuum', so...

It would probably be something of an adventure, but I bet I'd come out of it okay. Especially if I waited 'till I had Sympathy teleportation worked out.

You're going to have sorcerous teleportation, so there's that.

True! That makes the other thing less important but probably still worth doing, especially before the necklace's been duplicated.

Yeah. I might want your magic, incidentally, I probably will never have a reason to rely on it heavily but it can't hurt to have more magic powers.

And if you have it you can distribute it. Oh, it's also possible but much less efficient to transfer it by doing a lot of magic around a person, in case you ever want to teach it to any Dwarves. And you should probably teach your Maedhros.

Will do. How much is a lot?

Took me several days at, you know, my pace, and I was actively trying to figure out some way of doing it since osanwe didn't work.

Dwarves are a fantastic robust design but they are kinda missing out on some of the nice benign communicative stuff.

Yeah. Also, they have chocolate.

Chocolate is very important.

It is! I can generate matter from an existing template so I ended up buying some chocolate and a license to do that from a dwarven chocolatier with a bit of the proceeds from the magic.

If giving them magic doesn't have you set for life, teleportation couriering is very lucrative, FYI.

Noted.

Although since they don't like to publicize the locations of their kingdoms I had to wait months for it to be confirmed the long way around that they wanted this service.

Fair enough. It's not like I don't have enough Things To Do.

I assume you've received all the advice about pacing yourself and handling yourself as an irreplaceable wartime asset and so on.

Mhm. I'm generally either in Beth Miqlat--my sister's city--or Himlad--Tyelcormo's fortress--and they're both good at getting me to do that stuff.

Good.

I have to say delegating that particular task makes things easier.

I managed without being managed, but I'm particularly good at knowing how much I can push myself and I don't forget to eat or anything.

It's actually not just the fact that I don't have to worry about it as much myself, it's--easier--to stop what I'm doing and sleep or eat something if I have "make this person I care about happy" as a motivation to do it on top of abstract self-care. And it's easier to overlook hunger pangs when you're also in several other kinds of pain because magic.

Ah, that makes sense. I'm glad you have people, then, and I will assume Tyelcormo nets positive in spite of how much time you probably spend thinking about how soft his hair is.

Well, I don't know how soft his hair is, but. Yes.

Do you want to know? Or would this be a problem?

I think I would like to know.

Gimme the necklace back and I'll produce higher-fidelity memory.

She hands over the necklace.

Tyelcormo's hair is so soft.

Ooh.

Anything else you want while I've got this on? Maedhros smiling for real? Angband going up in a mushroom cloud, which was really satisfying for a short time until we realized? Happy un-oathed orcs?

Yes. Please.

Loki can provide all these things. (Maedhros's smile is a little cropped of context. How the fuck is she supposed to hang out with this person long enough to transmit all her spells and not out the maudlin gay Elves.)

(It's a pity she doesn't know Lady Hareth already did that.)

"I think I was right. About him actually being happy for a moment when I gave him magic."

"It's possible. It happens occasionally before he believes things are real, it's just easier after that."

"I wish I knew how to prove that."

"Well, if you can convince the oath not to exist..."

"Well, there's that."

"That plus having a conspicuously Enemy-antagonizing personality should do the trick, worked for me - I don't think it's a necessary ingredient that he also thought I was orchestrating his hallucination personally, which he probably doesn't think of you if he's been out for a long time and you didn't personally rescue him."

"Here's hoping."

Inside she's trilling with delight. I can fix it, I can fix it, it'll always have happened and that's not okay but I can fix it!

"And there's - gradations, within 'thinking it's a hallucination' - he bumped up the percentage over time, a bit - that might require identifying the self-insert hallucination character though."

"The self-insert hallucination character?"

"He was dangling from a cliff, I turned him into a bird and hauled him out claiming to be from another world, I kept showing up, my presence was obviously the premise of the rescue and the storyline and so on, and he could tell I wasn't Sauron. He thought I was a Maia for a while, but then I produced enough stuff - ideas and books and stuff from my own world, especially once I had the eidetic necklace - that he updated to me being a real person whose pretense extended probably only as far as pretending not to be working for the Enemy, orchestrating a hallucination, etcetera. We got to know each other quite well and eventually he was convinced that the real person I was wouldn't work for the Enemy, especially and not tell him at that point, unless slightly different and fantastically bribed, some kind of 'give relatively pleasant hallucinations to prisoners who'd otherwise be horribly tortured and I stop hurting orcs' deal. And then I gave everybody free will and he knew no bribery would survive the point at which I had that kind of power to sling around."

"I have no idea if he thinks whoever's supposedly orchestrating this is operating someone in it."

"Well, obviously if it's a hallucination somebody is operating everyone in it, but most of them are people he'd have known or known of before he was captured and anyone who didn't appear near the beginning of the hallucination doesn't have as obvious 'hello, I'm probably an evil Maia or something' sign painted on them."

"Unless he thinks it's me I really don't think there's much I can do besides start mucking with the fabric of reality."

"Yeah. I mean, I suppose he might, but I can't confidently assume so. You may feel free to dump this entire conversation on him if you think it'll help."

"Minus the part about how soft his brother's hair is."

"Well, you could include that I mentioned it, it will make me a more three-dimensional figure in the story, but yeah, leave the sense-memory out."

"I'm really not sure I want to actually tell him I have a giant crush on his brother, I'm sure he's psychicked it out but actively bringing it up might be a bad idea so soon after the Estolad thing."

"Redact as you see fit. Estolad thing?"

"Remember how I said it had been empirically demonstrated that elves could accidentally have children with non-elves?"

"Oh dear."

"It didn't occur to them until it occurred to me to check if there were adorable half-elf children in the area where it was discovered that humans didn't automatically trigger the soul thing."

"Uh, potential infohazard, you want it or not?"

"Sure."

"According to Lúthien it's expectation-based. The Valar told everybody how it worked, so that's the going story, but it doesn't fundamentally work that way, it kicks in when the participants think they've done something that would cause it to do so."

She laughs. "That makes so much more sense than 'straight marriage is metaphysically supported but gay marriage isn't.'"

"Mind, I haven't actually seen any examples of metaphysical gay marriage because my Elves can't do oaths anymore and I didn't go around shouting this from the rooftops, especially to all the nice lesbians Maedhros located for me, but yes, it does."

"Tyelcormo brought up the possibility of introducing my sister to lesbian elves at one point but it was decided against for various reasons."

"It is not completely without complications, but I think he was concerned I might otherwise go sleep with Thuringwethil or something - have you met her, is she still alive?"

"I have not met her! I don't know if she's alive or not, I can look her up if you tell me where to look?"

"She lives" here "but I'm not sure you want to meet her, she's sort of dubiously neutral and sometimes does the Enemy favors - did me a few favors, too, there's a few things I needed a Maia for and Huan was not always suited and the friendly river Maia with no spoken name was a little too one-track-mind."

"Huh."

"I met her when Sauron was fucking with me by sending me orcs who were not at that moment ordered hostile but of course could have been made so by osanwë within a radius of hundreds of miles at any time - she escorted a bunch of orcs and their babies out to where I was with the Men. I chased her down."

"What happened to...?"

"The babies weren't old enough to have sworn. Some Men adopted them."

"Not the worst thing that could have happened."

"They're all alive again now except for the ones who wouldn't route through Mandos, I don't have a good reembodying solution for any of those."

"When I can teleport...do you know where their souls are?"

"The ones not in Mandos? Yeah -" She gets paper from Bar, slaps a map down on it, marks spots. "Unless they've moved."

"I can probably fix it, then."

"Oaths do persist past death, so you'll need that solved if you're going to bring back orcs."

"Well, for the ones in my world, sure, that's a longer-term problem."

"- well, I'm not in my Arda, other side of my door, but once you've got the teleport spell you can go there, if I hold the door."

"So it still works."

"Yes. And then you can hop them all to the orc planet. Unfortunately you can't get the Tesseract because it objects to most people handling it."

"I could get someone to hold the door so you could."

"- ah, yeah, you can get my best friend off Asgard, he'll be able to hold it, he's native to the world."

"First you need to finish teaching me to teleport."

"Yes, yes I do. Prepare for tedium." She returns the necklace.

She transmits 209 atomic concepts and a shit ton of text therein.

It is tedious but she is gleeful about what can be done with it.

And then Loki holds the door for her and tells her where Sigyn lives.

Sigyn is like 3/4 asleep when he answers the door but he is willing to be teleported to where Loki is and hold a door as long as he can bring his fluffy blanket.

She is pleased to meet him and his fluffy blanket and escort them to Milliways!

Loki ruffles his hair -

- and pops off -

- and comes back with a glowy blue cube on a stick. "Thank you, Sigyn."

"Should I fix your orcs before or after you fix my evil deities?"

"Either way! Fixing your evil deities won't take but a moment, though."

"Alright, why don't you go first. Help yourself to any Balrogs you'd like to see explode while you're there if you like."

Loki motions Sigyn off and gestures for Odette to hold the door.

The door gets significantly larger. And more double. And more fancy.

And Loki steps through and touches the cube and ignites with coruscating blue energy and smears Morgoth and Sauron across the cosmos.

Best thing.

And the fortress is crumbling, so Loki puts all the orcs elsewhere and disintegrates the Balrogs, bouncing osanwë impressions of the eerie sense of infinite-reachability and beyond-telekinesis the Tesseract offers her and what she's doing with it.

Fascinating.

Explaining this is probably going to manage to be fun both sincerely and sarcastically.

"I can grab the Reality Stone and also de-oath everybody. However, the Reality Stone does not believe that orcs and Elves are different things, so I can't do this very precisely, and I also can't hold onto it for very long."

"...It would be nice if I could ask people first, I hope no one hates me for this, but there are so many orcs..."

"The Reality Stone does believe that individual people are different things, so I can do some reversals, I can hold it long enough to do a few dozen of those."

"There's that. It's still--nonconsensual soul alteration. Keep sending me sensations? And I'll pay attention with magic senses and maybe I can put people back too at some point."

"- or maybe the Reality Stone would like you more than it likes me, or even if it only likes you the same amount you're better equipped to work through having something eat your arm - the Tesseract can hazard a guess, can you - try to explain to it who you are by osanwë -?"

"I can stand having something eat my arm fine." She projects as much of herself as she can at the Tesseract. With retroactive perfect recall, it's a lot.

"Tesseract thinks the Aether probably won't kill you. Do you like those odds?"

"Let me get someone to hold the door for you so you can do the messy version if I die."

Nod.

She finds someone to hold the door. She tells her sister what's going on and gives her last-minute "in case of my death" instructions. Illia's the farthest thing from happy about it but she understands.

"I'm going to put it in your hand. I'll hold your other hand and heal you while you work. Be careful with it. It's one of the most powerful weapons in the universe, and it's only not the most so because it's got siblings."

Loki takes her hand.

Red chewing liquid takes her other.

Power is pain. Odette's known that for as long as she can remember.

She gives everyone free will.

Can you do some kind of--locational thing--make us in osanwe range of every single elf?

Yes, here.

They are in osanwë range of every single Elf.

She asks who wants the ability to make oaths back and gives it to them.

(The Doom can stay emphatically eradicated.)

Let me know when you're done with it.

--Take us to Valinor, first, so I can grab everyone out of Mandos, and then somewhere I can put all of them once they're alive again; it doesn't need to do for the long term but the dead don't respond to osanwe.

Loki doesn't have to actually take them to Valinor to put them in easy range of Valinor for their purposes and not, say, Mandos's. And here's some middle of nowhere.

Put. Fetch triple-cognition rocks, resurrect resurrect resurrect--

It takes a while but eventually everyone is alive and has been consulted on whether they would like her to take their new free will back.

Should I do this for yours, too, while I'm in the neighborhood rezzing people?

That would be very nice of you, I keep meaning to accumulate a second batch of people to de-free-will but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I don't mind, this isn't comfortable but I've gone through worse on purpose for poorer reasons plenty of times.

I am going to round this planet. It should not be flat. It is undignified.

Loki rounds the planet.

There. Anything else we should do here before you go patch mine?

Not unless you wanna meet/explain ourselves to any of my versions of people you know.

I would be delighted, and vice-versa, but it can wait, Sigyn's not going anywhere and while you're not in your world time there's stopped anyway.

Sigyn is again induced to hold the door and Loki puts Odette as close as she has to be to the stray souls on her Arda.

Resurrections!

Relocations!

I should make an Orc Planet, Odette muses.

Yeah, even de-oathed they're not all huge fans of Elves.

Probably won't be a fan of me either. I've killed kind of a lot of them.

So did I. They actually seem fairly philosophical about that on the whole.

You did it in melee, right, or at least conventional combat, the kind of thing they could see coming and at least imagine being able to beat?

Some of them. - But you saw my fight with Sauron.

Yeah, but I was a flying elf-eyed being who made them keel over of no apparent cause whatsoever. Kinda different on a psychological level.

If you think that's substantially different from somebody who turns invisible or into a bird or both and flings accelerated magic songs around like projectiles and shoots ice out of her hands...