"By which time we can safely assume we'll be dead or have the Silmarils back," he says. "I'll let you know how we did it and produce some for you, if we can indeed reverse-engineer it."

"Thank you. I'd actually benefit from some deteriorating paper too; it unlike an illusion can be tucked away while I'm a bird."

"Well, that we have hundreds of; Curufinwë can show you in the workshop."

Loki nods, flips through her notes to see if she forgot anything - "Oh, and - I mentioned to Lúthien your interest in an alliance with Elu and she recommended an approach which I assume you are thoroughly disinterested in but may as well mention -" She pulls it out.

"The people of Lake Mithrim and the surrounding areas," Macalaurë says, "think poorly of Elu Thingol and of the whole concept that one can claim sovereignty over peoples one is willing to let die. Elu is as much the King of Beleriand as I am the King of Angband."

"Mm-hm. Shall I bother to ask him about an alliance of any kind or give it up unless Lúthien has a better idea?"

"Obviously we'd prefer having a working relationship with him to not having one," Fëanor says, "We'll settle in the areas he permits, and the offer to give him lots of shiny Noldorin presents remains standing. If that's enough for you to work with, by all means try."

"I'll run it by Lúthien," Loki says, writing this down. "I'm going to go to Círdan probably before I'm next here; anything to say to him?"

Notesnotenotesnotes. "I think that's everything. Workshop?"

Curufinwë stands. Everyone else leans over and starts listing priorities and the resources currently devoted to them.

Loki follows Curufinwë.

The workshop is enormous, counters and tables everywhere and shelves above and drawers below. "Melkor took everything from my father's workshop when he killed my grandfather," he says, "we had to rebuild all our instruments. Now that's done, everything is going much faster. Here is the paper that's not satisfactory; we expect it'll degrade and be too fragile for use within fifty to a hundred years." He picks up a sheaf of it. "You wanted to teach us Asgardian technology?"

"Sure. With a focus on things I can explain to Maitimo without him assuming some underlying principle is made up, but you could benefit from electricity too. If you have magnets, which I have no ability to help you find; do you have magnets?"

"The word is unfamiliar."

"Okay, so you don't have a word for magnets, but -" Visual aids. "Weird metallic things that attract or repel each other at a shortish distance depending on how they're turned? Cling to iron?"

"Yes," he says, "those we have. I'll be unpopular, I'm going to demand a lot of people bring me their childrens' toys."

"Sorry. There are other ways to make electricity but this one requires the least infrastructure and the least filling in gaps in my spotty education. So you get magnets, and you move magnets and wire - copper is good, if you can't get copper others can work - relative to each other -" Visual aids. "And then this will generate the same sort of thing that lightning and static shocks in dry weather are. When you have enough of it and you can control it well enough - I am afraid I am not particularly useful for the intermediate stages here - you can run almost anything that does mechanical work on it, and make lights, although you might not find them particularly called for -" Spinning fan, glowing bulb. "- and you can also run information-processing devices on it -" Basic logic circuit, multiplying upon itself until the illusion no longer shows the individual ones. "Which can then be attached to other devices and cause them to display complex behavior at incredible speed and/or without personal attention."

He nods. Furrows his brow. "Do you understand how it is created? What laws govern it, in particular?"

"Yes. Sort of. Uh, I did a chem lecture for the other host, let me see what I can remember from when I was reconstructing things then - also, general disclaimer, your realm is very strange, suns do not normally appear one day, absolutely anything I say about physics is about the behavior of matter when it is not under the influence of magic or divine intervention and cannot be relied upon in other circumstances -" She recreates her periodic table. "I don't remember all of the elements, if you name something I will be able to tell you if it is an element or not, anyway the difference between elements is that if you have the smallest amount it is possible to have of one of them it is a single blob of absurdly tiny things surrounded by a cloud of even more absurdly tiny things. This diagram," she produces one of hydrogen, "is simplified the way a stick figure is a simplified anatomical diagram of a person, but it has the basics - hydrogen is one proton, and one electron, and they stick to one another in a manner analogous to magnets. Electricity is the motion of electrons - I am again oversimplifying, I know there is more to this but I don't remember the full explanation, I learned this so long ago. Some materials, such as copper, conduct electricity along themselves well - they will tend to also be good conductors of heat, easier to notice. Some resist it - rubber does that; you will want to have protective rubber clothing when you're working with electricity, you may wish to coat your wire in it, it's not perfect but it's better than working barehanded."

"Tyelperinquar," he says, "I require copper wire in addition to the magnets." And he pulls out a piece of the inadequate paper and starts copying.

"If you want I can just stick these illusions to the paper," she says. "The arguable drawback is that if the paper is altered or destroyed enough that the spell can't recognize the attachment anymore the illusion will stay put wherever it was when that happened."

"If the paper is that altered or destroyed, my notes would also likely be useless, yes? If it's no trouble for you, yes, let's do that."

"What I meant was that they might inconveniently hang around in midair or something until you could ask me to clear them away or attach them elsewhere, not that they wouldn't serve in any case writing would," she says, but she shrinks the table and the stick-figure hydrogen and sticks them to inadequate paper. "The difference between elements is the number of protons and electrons, which match except insofar as the elements are combining in ways that affect that. The table's arranged this way because the electrons form layers, but I don't remember the number of electrons in each, it's something irregular. Anyway, you'll probably want to generate electricity by building something like a water wheel," picture, "on a river, to turn the magnet or wire - which will probably depend on how much wire and how large magnets you can get, so that someone doesn't have to stand around turning a crank all day."

"What's the easiest proof of concept, here? The simplest thing that will demonstrate electrons are moving through my wire?"