Oh, Idaia.

Since he was apparently crying too hard to see her outfit she sends him an image of herself as seen in a mirror in it--red corset, silver eight-pointed star buttons, white skirt and jacket.

How - where -

Total coincidence! Found the corset in a thrift store, obviously I had to buy it, and finding white garments isn't hard in itself!

I love you so much.

I love you more than anything else in the world except Imliss.

He giggles weakly. She okay?

She's fine. She's currently in my dorm room with Smol Your Dad.

That doesn't make any sense, you know.

How much of what's been going on has been explained to you?

I may have stopped paying attention at "Idaia's alive".

Reasonable, she thinks fondly. So a few weeks ago instead of my closet I found an interdimensional bar and met a woman named Bella. Bella's home universe is pretty terrible, but she got accidentally sent in a non-snake manner to Valinor--a different Valinor, at a different point in time, where she met a ten-year-old version of your dad, saved your grandmother, introduced her world's magic system, and eventually got kicked by the Valar back to her terrible original universe because the Valar are terrible. She escaped to this relatively non-terrible universe with me via the magic bar and her version of your dad came here intending to rescue her from her terrible universe and found us instead. Then it was posited that our Feanaro might've managed to escape Mandos somehow so we checked because it was a cheap test and discovered that you are in fact alive. She's so happy he's alive.

You might have to tell me all that again sometime when I'm more able to focus.

Fair enough. There is a little kid version of your dad from an alternate Valinor in my room and he's how we found you.

Which means that we don't have a room.

It's kind of a problem! Maybe I can ask someone else if we could use theirs...

We should probably just start driving everyone to Canada, we'll be there in a few days...

Yeah.

Love you.

So are we going in the stolen car and hoping no police notice it's stolen or borrowing someone else's or what?

Let's let someone else think about that, sounds complicated. Also it's just borrowed, not stolen.

Borrowed like you actually asked first or just borrowed like you're planning to give it back?

I asked but I might not have mentioned I was taking it all the way to California.

Not the most honest thing ever but I think legally we're covered. Imliss rented a trailer so we don't have to deal with pesky things like seatbelts or anything to keep us from holding onto each other but I don't think the noise of driving is likely to be enough to protect smol Quendi ears so we should probably behave ourselves.

Car radios go really loud.

Does the car have a CD player? I assume so, but I wasn't paying attention to the car when you were getting out of it, it could be super old, I have a ton of music so we don't have to bet on the radio happening to have something pretty enough to justify playing it loudly.

I don't know. Probably, I don't think it's super old or it wouldn't have been happy about how fast I was driving it -