And eventually the car will round a bend and find itself looking at a stunning, recognizably Noldorin castle wedged into the mountains.

Ooooh.

Hello? We're here.

Hello! Come on in, everyone who could get time off without any suspicion is here.

And in they troop.

The castle is prettier on the inside! Imliss and Idaia get hugs from a whole crowd of men who all look to varying degrees like Fëanáro. Then everyone regards Bella and Rúmil and little Fëanáro with confusion.

"...Hi, I'm Bella, this is Rúmil, and this is an alternate universe version of your dad."

"That much was explained! It's just one of those explanations that invites more questions."

"Well, feel free to ask them."

"Another Arda? With the point of divergence being your arrival? When did you arrive? What world did you come from? Have your world's Valar been told not to fucking let Melkor out - uh, sorry, small version of my father -"

"I landed there in a magical accident a little under two Valian Years ago. Can't identify any points of divergence prior to my arrival, although everything after it is hopelessly confounded. I named my world Materia because it's called the Prime Material Plane to distinguish it from other planes it's in regular contact with - of which my Arda's not one, that seems to have been a bizarre irregularity that was never replicated - and, uh, no, have not been in touch with my Valar since they kicked me out."

"They kicked you out?"

"I disrupted the bliss of Valinor by inventing too many things too quickly for them to keep track of even though they could break the things any time they felt like it and did some of exactly that, and they wouldn't settle for sending me to the Outer Lands so instead they sent me back to my home world which I was convinced would kill me while I knelt and begged for my life it was tremendous fun."

"We spent kind of a lot of time commiserating over how much the Valar suck."

"That's appalling. Not as appalling as the fall of Númenor, so my opinion of them can't really decline further, but still. I'm sorry. I'm glad you're safe now."

"Thanks. Me too. I'm glad I got out of Materia before Fëanáro came to rescue me, I still don't know if Materia would have been guaranteed to eat him or not."

"Guaranteed to eat him?"

"Materia hates science."

"That doesn't actually make sense."

"I know! But Materia squishes people who agree with us."

"Loosely you can think of the Materian universe itself as an agent. A shy, temperamental agent which hates being expected to behave itself in a regular manner. So if you try to catch it doing that it might kill you or it might make whatever you're looking at suddenly behave differently or whatever. Someone tried dropping a lot of objects from a height and measuring how fast they fell and now things fall sideways for a few miles around where they did that, I don't remember if the experimenter survived or not in that case. Anyway, the Valar said they were protecting me - and their anti-aging thing held up okay, I still look just shy of twenty and I'm pushing forty - but I also didn't experiment with the boundaries of that protection, so I'm not sure if they pulled it off or if Materia doesn't mind if one does science to other universes as long as one doesn't do any there. If it's the first one, the place isn't safe to visit even if you can restrain locally dangerous impulses for the duration. ...And if it's the second one Materia, being Materia, reserves the right to change its mind at any time."

"Okay. ...we're not very equipped for saving any worlds right now anyway. I'll shelve it. Glad you're safe. Nice to meet you. Nice to, uh, meet you too, Rúmil -"

"Ah, so you do know me! I was trying to work out why I'd dropped out of the story between Bella's time and Idaia's."

"You sided with my father's half-brother in the succession dispute." A little coldly, but only a little; he mostly sounds exhausted.

"Fëanáro is one of the people I respect most but I think it is absurd that he was considered to run the country," he says solemnly. "Waste of his talents. And I'd like to hear more but maybe not right now, I don't think the painful-conversation to important-information ratio looks very good there..."

"Probably not. Come in, all of you, sit down, you must have a lot of questions..."