At all?

Well, there are the hugs. There are now semi-regular hugs. Is that improvement? Maitimo certainly wants them to think so. 

Sort of. It means something that he has the internal resources to pull it off, anyway.

The Noldor are a very efficient state at war. They now have far more war servants than actual citizens, and can launch a siege of Angband. Findekáno directs it. They encircle the place after five days of fighting. Supply lines would ordinarily be a problem with a siege that far north and into the mountains, but not with war servants. 

Not really what Kib imagined he'd be doing with his life when he was accepting his apprenticeship, but important. Is this going to interfere with the budding Men/orcs friendship? That'd be a perk.

Those orcs can't return to Angband, so that's something. They are obviously being directed by someone outside Angband, or else innately have goals very aligned with Melkor's, because they continue being charming Elf-hating assistants to the Men.

Thauron gets the Men literate, gets them building water wheels, is by all appearances interested in having them powerful, and quickly.

I don't really see why. Orcs are in every respect more useful - they can't be suborned, they breed faster...

Free will?

...think he doesn't like the destined course of history, and thinks he needs some humans to mess it up?

Enemy gave me prophecies.

So he was pretty desperate for things not to turn out - however they originally did. Which is odd, because the way they originally turned out looked pretty good for him to my eye...

Well, we don't have arbitrarily far into the future...

If he thought giving you more information would make the ending worse he must have been desperate or stupid.

And it'd be weird for him to settle for 'different'. Maybe he was able to - pivot off my reacting to it, somehow, and do different stuff of his own -

Maybe. The equivalent of needing a random seed for unpredictable behavior - but then why bother with nonservant-maker humans now - 

Don't know. Maybe he's getting updated prophecies and isn't thrilled with those either?

I hope so. 

I don't know if that's even how prophecies work. Sigh.

I should ask if anyone here's gotten any.

I'd hope they'd have told me, but yeah, I haven't been actually asking.

If you're not sharing them with people who could change them they can be hard to tell from regular dreams. People might hesitate to waste your time. It's worth asking.

Nod.

It's a good harvest. There's a festival. Macalaure, who seems extremely glad of the break from composing songs to speed up chassis assembly lines, has one composed about the rescue of the King. It's good. The dialogue is vaguely suggestive, but musically very impressive, brings tears to everyone's eyes.

Oh, good, then it will not be odd if Kib can't keep from crying. He's moderately restrained about it, just...

The lovely, daring, valiant, miraculous rescue of the King, who beams in the moonlight and dances with his little sister.

Yeah.

Aaaaaugh. Can Findekáno slip away after this.