In they come. Down they sit. "Did Mandos tamper with any of you or - not?"

"The email answered most of them, but yeah."

"Answer on Mandos is 'not that we noticed'. We are all still capable of being stubbornly unrepentant, for example. We do it sometimes just to check. Dunno if he straightened Tyelcormo out but he's married anyway, and the rest of us were straight, so."

Nod. Not freaking them out with premature mentions of subtle arts.

"Other stuff?"

"I'm not sure what else to ask."

"Okay, then our turn. What's your world's magic system?"

"It's kind of got several but what I work in is called wizardry, a subset of arcane magic. It starts with small structured spells and as you develop experience with them you can break them down into more foundational principles and mix-and-match to enchant stuff or customize spells for whatever purpose. I don't actually know much about how spell development works in Materia because it wasn't my focus before I had my accident and I didn't dare touch magic after I got kicked back, but in a science world it's pretty doable to reverse-engineer and develop new spells. So I've got high school level introductory spells, and what I invented from there over a Year of not noticing Valinor's time effect and a much shorter period of having worked around the time effect."

"And we can in principle develop more from there?"

"Yep!"

"What do you need in order to do that?"

"Not much and I've already got it! Well, substrates to enchant, for anything that is best accomplished with an enchanted object, like my boots."

"All right! And you can teach us?"

"Yeah! Although you won't have very much mana until you've practiced a fair amount - used to tap Maiar for extra but I'm guessing that's not going to be doable here - and you replenish mana by sleeping or at least not doing anything much, which perpetually annoys Fëanáro -"

"Practiced a fair amount as in years or centuries?"

"She's human," she reminds him, "and this magic was in common use among her species in her original world, so I'm going to guess not centuries."

"But Fëanáro's I take it had a couple decades at it -"

"Mana scales up gradually. I can't tell exactly how much you have now but it will take years-not-decades before you have as much as me and that's if you sleep every night and practice every day."

"Okay. So we shouldn't count on this as the avenue to get Idaia and Imliss made immortal, but we can probably wait on the Silmaril retrieval until we have the wizardry for it."

"Mana supply limits your casting much more than it limits your theoretical ability. Once you have the basics you'll be able to help invent spells to do things like make people immortal. That's the sort of thing that would normally be divine and not arcane magic in Materia but there's some reason to believe the divide doesn't need to be that sharp in a science world."

"Okay. Something to summon a Silmaril from Venus, what would our timeline be on that?"

"Probably not that long? We had intercontinental transit. The mana expenditure might be a big deal with as far away as other planets are though..."

"Okay. We think we can hold out minimum of another century, so it sounds like with enough practice someone'll have the mana by then."

"And it doesn't have to be a single person, it's possible to tap others for extra."

"Do they have to themselves be practicing magic, or can you tap random civilians..."