leave of absence | Glowfic Constellation

purposeful_glory

"...Well, simplest would be to touch it but that's a bad idea. I'm not sure. Even a lightbulb requires capturing a non-reactive gas to fill the bulb with... at least I think it does, there may be a more primitive version which doesn't but I don't know. I'm afraid all the little engineering kits I played with had a lot of premade parts. I'm absolutely certain you can get somewhere with this concept but you might have to reinvent most of it yourself; I know half-remembered fundamentals and the opaque results of many millennia of devoted engineering by civilizations with millions or billions of people in them and precious little about the middle."

"You return Elenya? I'll have a light by then."

purposeful_glory

"I will be suitably impressed if you manage a light with this. And whatever you connect the light to the wire with, you can have it set up so that you can close and open a gap in the line; and then you can turn the light on and off." She flicks at an illusion switch; the lightbulb goes on and off.

He nods. "That application occurred to me when you said that you could use it to do maths."

purposeful_glory

"The ones that do math are very cool. Does this suffice for introduction to electricity, shall I move on to steam engines?"

"Yes."

purposeful_glory

So she explains steam engines, and from there tries to focus mostly on things that will make sense to Maitimo: do you have gears, clockwork? Ooh, slugthrowers, they're probably not actually an improvement over the bow for your purposes yet but if you get them to do this and that and this other thing they're a big deal but she doesn't remember anything more complicated than 'explosion goes here, bullet goes here' because they're on the Asgardian No List... She's already explained movable type... have you invented ice skates, carabiners, the following varieties of knots, the hang glider, a loom as complex as her father's, canning, the caster wheel...?

Some of those, but not all. His enthusiasm for her grows with each new invention.

"This may be enough all by itself," he says, "this and the lightning-harnesser once I become sophisticated in it, and slug throwers would be of use to the Enemy much sooner than to us and Maitimo can reasonably presume Moringotto doesn't know of it. Your people are talented." It is said very emphatically, with great weight.

purposeful_glory

"I'm not sure he'll believe in electricity," she says. "Combine this children's toy with copper wire and produce arbitrary effects with enough doodads I can't explain involved! I'm assuming he'll have to rely on things that work by mechanical principles he can reason out in his own head. I think the other realms are mostly benefiting from an extremely generous head start, the fact that I could pick and choose from the fruits of so many of them when studying and again when relaying them to you, and not unusual average talent. If you have an electric light on Elenya you'll be the toast of any inventor's convention in the galaxy I might fetch you to by the time I have the power to do that."

"Galaxy? And the Quendi are built for the Ages, and have a tendency to take them. My father has never felt like he has enough time, or like he can afford to waste any of it, and I suppose it's a contagious attitude. We worked like we were going to die even before it was true."

purposeful_glory

"It's serving you well in an urgent time," she says. "And makes my culture shock the less here, in that respect. A galaxy is," visual aid! "many, many stars. All the realms I know of are in this one, except possibly here, because here is weird. Each of these points of light is one or many stars - I do not have enough room in my visual field or sharp enough eyes to have ever formed a very good mental image, and have certainly misplaced some things, but this is close enough to look to me like my galaxy. Asgard is here... Midgard here..."

Awe, delight, reverence. "I hope very dearly that your magical abilities prove also to be possible to replicate, so that someday we can see them," he says.

purposeful_glory

"Well, I got here by Bifrost, and I did not make the Bifrost. It can be done without my ground-up view, it will just take longer. And be less elegant. By a lot."

"Time we'll have, once the war is won, especially now that we know the Simarils were not destroyed and the Enemy bears them."

purposeful_glory

"Oh, is that what they do?"

"When the Valar invited us to come live in their paradise, there was a catch they neglected to mention and in fairness may not have known about. Those of us born to Valinor cannot live indefinitely outside it. We fade, over the Ages, we start to exist less and less in the physical world and to lose our capacity to act within it. Eventually we become - shadows, ghosts, observers, watching the world but taking no part in it, or appearing to the younger races only as a glimmer in the corner of their vision.

When we learned that, we despaired of departing. Valinor was not a good place for us but that would be an unendurable fate. Then Father set his mind to it - and it was a project the likes of which he hadn't tried before, it nearly killed him, we didn't see him for a decade and he says that he put his soul into the making and I am not sure he speaks metaphorically. He captured the divine light of the Trees, the light of Valinor, in the Silmarils. In their presence decay is halted; it is as if we walked in Valinor again, in terms of strength, and we will endure the ages of the world. The Silmarils are necessary to an independent kingdom of exiles enduring forever outside Valinor. They are our highest priority, higher even than the Enemy himself though obviously currently in his hands, because my father, who claims nothing at all is ever impossible, does not think he could replicate that work."

purposeful_glory

"How much ground could they cover...? If they fit in a crown they can't be very big. Could they serve a whole continentful? Or does this definitely only affect those who were born in Valinor, so you could all live in some concentrated location and everyone else will be fine?"

"A visit once every thirty thousand years would be sufficient exposure to remedy the fading. And I think my father eventually intends to put them up in the sky with the Moon and Sun, where they'd serve as well as they do here. We don't know who will be affected."

purposeful_glory

"Well, putting things in orbit, especially small things, is doable if you have standard orbital mechanics, and I suppose you have a proof of concept already for the case where you haven't because the sun got there somehow."

"There are three Silmarils. Eventually, if the other realms are accessible to us, we could spread across three of them, but no more; though we could visit others for Ages at a time. You understand why we consider them a vital priority."

purposeful_glory

"Yes. You could maybe find a planet with a lot of habitable moons and all benefit from a single one... if the Silmarils are bright enough maybe you could run a whole system on one... but it does constrain your growth substantially."

"They also refract each others' light in ways that are useful; Father thinks he might be able to cover a much larger radius with all three, and the right arrangement between them. As a constraint it is tolerable to us; we can make a pilgrimage even back to Arda, every few Ages, if that's the way we strike out as free people. We'd feared that the Enemy destroyed the Silmarils; they have combat advantages for him, but were he wise he'd have destroyed them for the permanent harm to us."

purposeful_glory

"Are they fragile? That will complicate putting them in space."

"Almost impossible to destroy. Ungoliant, who eats light, might have been able to eat them, and that is the only thing I've ever heard of that would even perhaps do it. Father has common sense, you know. Well, with respect to engineering."

purposeful_glory