He blinks at them.

He's sitting on his throne looking relaxed and perhaps bored and in reality conducting thirty conversations at once. He concludes them while slowly blinking at the new arrivals. 

"...hello," he says. "Teleportation or really excellent invisibility?" And he waves the guards back.

"Both! Teleportation in this case. We interrupting anything?"

"A war, I hope! Do you happen to also have magic up your sleeves that would let me efficiently convince you my side ought to be the winning one?"

"You are, like, Maitimo number nine of our acquaintance," she says, "although five of those sort of don't count. The only reason I didn't kill the Enemy first and visit second is last time there was a deadman switch setup and figuring out if there's anything like that here requires nonzero locality-specific information."

"I don't know what information you'd require; if you've met nine of me you probably have more information about whether there's a deadman switch setup than I do. I also cannot help you, we're currently sworn to a ceasefire, though you said that like you don't expect to need much help."

"...you're sworn to a ceasefire? That's new."

"The war escalated to the exchange of extremely destructive weapons and we had something cobbled together from the Silmarils that would have killed him but would have taken half the planet's population with, and so we negotiated. He's not allowed to hurt anyone." 

He elides Elspeth, because this woman looks like Elspeth's mother and Elspeth's mother was purportedly likely to want him dead. Though if this woman got along with nine other Maitimos then probably she doesn't have the same reservations - or the other Maitimos had more discretion - 

"Anyone anyone, or like, non-orcs, or what."

"Anyone I call a citizen, a privilege I've been abusing."

"Well, that's not going to do in the long run. Well. If you can't help I may have to have another entire conversation with Sauron, I hate having conversations with Saurons..."

"Could try the Valar."

"Guess they might know."

"Did some of my counterparts know? What information should I be asking around for? Not that I expect the Valar'll kill you on sight but I also don't expect very strongly that they won't do that."

"The Valar will not successfully kill us on sight, anyway," says Loki. "Not that it couldn't be very irritating if they tried, but Valar are often sort of irritating even when they aren't doing that. Your counterparts did not know about the deadman switch as such, we found out about it by lucky accident, but we'll have an easier time knowing where to look with more precision than 'well, the Valar might know' if we know what's weird about this Arda compared to the others."

"And the ceasefire's weird? The Silmarils being weaponizable to destroy the Enemy: is that weird?"

"Yeah, actually, both cases I got there first. What's your angle on that?"

"They can effectively stop time within a radius, that works fine on Valar. They can tweak what they do to the stuff in that timestopped radius, and one thing is 'have every atom decay at a different rate' and we didn't get a chance to try it but given how quickly he agreed to generous ceasefire terms I'm pretty sure it would have worked."

"Timestop thing saw use in the other flat Arda, but it was defense, not offense."

"Getting it to work as offense took us years! Though my father's dead and could probably have done it in a couple of months. I suppose it all depends on when you got your Silmarils back relative to when your hand was forced."

"Dead Fëanor is also new. How'd he die?"

"He was assassinated by his half-brother when the Noldor had a civil war, three hundred fifty-some years ago."

"Eugh. Okay. Didn't escalate that far in the others and you're farther ahead timelinewise."

"I should congratulate my counterparts on defusing it better. I managed, but it took too long and cost too much."

"Not actually sure to what extent they'll take credit for that. Could be a difference farther upstream."

"Melkor pardoned in 1400? My father makes the Silmarils in 1450 and then starts working on various other necessities for an independent Noldorin kingdom? Gets provoked into pulling a sword on Nolofinwe in 1490, gets exiled by decree of the Valar, Melkor extinguishes the Trees and assassinates Finwe in 1495?"