"We haven't told the Dwarves the story of their creation."

"...I'm glad you told me that because I had heard it already and plan to speak with Dwarves before I leave here this visit. Anything else?"

"Don't tell anyone about the edges of the world if they seem likely to try to go peek over them."

"Okay. I have already told some people that planets are normally spherical, though - even people who live on spherical worlds don't always notice that early in their history."

"You can see it from the shoreline!"

"Well, nobody corrected me and Quendi eyesight is highly exceptional!"

"They are remarkable," she agrees. "Did you want to try different methods of magic-opposing, or are you inclined to think that none will work any better?"

"Do you have other avenues to suggest that don't require spell redesign?"

"Nothing comes to mind, but I still don't understand your magic fully. It might be that there's an approach to casting it that somehow avoids interference, or makes it much harder."

"I have two basic casting methods, designed one or the other into each spell. All except the illusions require touch range, or close to it - through clothes, yes, from inches away, no, I always count as touching myself however I'm positioned. I perform a very quick mental action to activate the spell and specify which of the possible targets I'm aiming at - so I can turn someone else into a bird without changing myself. Then it takes place instantaneously. The illusions are more complicated; I don't have a strict range limit but must have a clear mental understanding of what I mean to wind up with. I - do Maiar or for that matter Quendi have the thing where if they look at a thing and don't put a great deal of effort into memorizing it, they can call to mind an image that feels crisp and perfect and then find they can't count the freckles on the face, the leaves on the flower, whatever, it is only crisp in feel and not in content?"

"You'd have to ask a Quendi. I don't experience that."

"Well, it's a thing for me. So if I had to compose all my illusions based on mental images they'd come out bizarrely indistinct; and an actual visual experience can't carry the sensation of being complete when it isn't. What I get instead is an image that would leave the mental impression I have. It may be inexact if I'm not looking right at whatever I'm trying to copy. An illusion of my sister will not have exactly the right number of strands of hair. But if she looked like my illusion, my mind would produce the same thought when I tried to picture her as in fact it does. Same with sounds."

"I see. So you're ordering the world to leave a specific mental impression on viewers?"

"No; I'm not interacting with the minds at all. I'm arranging illusory light in such a way that it looks right when I look at it. If I were ordering an impression per se I probably wouldn't have so much trouble with seeing fewer colors."

"Right. Hmm. Can you make an illusion look different to different viewers?"

"No. Well, I suppose I could if I met someone who saw even fewer colors than I do, and I can play with angle so it looks one way from one direction and another way from another. But the illusion light is objectively placed."

"Hmm. Can you make an illusion of precisely the thing that's behind the illusion?"

"Yes. It's more exact than trying to do something I'm not looking straight at, because even my vague mental image can notice if something looks like it changes and the illusion avoids that; and then I can peel off or copy or shrink or expand the illusion from there."

"Could you make an illusion, in Angband, of everything that is in fact said in Angband, said normally?"

"Not - naively. That's not a limit of the spell, it's a limit of my attention and hearing. I can amplify something I can hear at all - that's how I had a conversation with your archers from far away when I first landed in Doriath - but if I have no subjective impression of hearing it I can't work with it as a template; no mental image."

"In that case I cannot think of anything."

"It seems like it'd be a more useful spell if I were a Quendi. Or a Maiar. I haven't had any sudden insights about how to teach 'this symbol means that one of two hundred nine irreducible sorcerous concepts for which I have no words'."

"Could you use a spell to imitate our native senses?"

"Yes, but I'd have to invent it. Teleportation's the higher priority than refined illusion."

"All right. Good fortune."