Lævateinn in its standard harmlesss state, she goes in. I have not been eaten by any of that really quite a large number of spiders.

I've heard they're quite numerous, yes. Occasionally something stirs them up and then thousands of them pour into Doriath and we have to send as many guards as we can spare to the northern border.

Well, I killed maybe a hundred, hundred twenty, so next time it will be thousands less that. They hunt by sound, if that's useful information, nothing changed when I was invisible but they were confused when they couldn't hear me.

Not sure it helps, because when they come in here they're not hunting. Unless we could figure out how to use song to distract or disorient them? I'll tell Mother, anyway. Are you coming back?

Yeah, I've just had a very nostalgic afternoon and it seems appropriate to cap it off with an actual dinner and sleeping in a bed tonight.

Alright. See you soon.

And so Loki makes her way back to Menegroth and heads for her guest room.

Lúthien's been in and out, left the blue-and-gold dress and a slate with chalk drawings on it.

What's the slate for?

Daeron wheedled me into a lesson on his letters. It says 'Lúthien', apparently. I wasn't sure if your translation magic would work on it.

Not yet. He'll need to write more things before it catches up. I could add it manually if he wanted to explain the alphabet to me, though, since it's for a spoken language that already exists.

Oooh, I bet he'd be delighted. Shall I send him your way?

Sure.

Someone is knocking on her door not twenty minutes later, which for an Elf is practically instantaneous.

Loki opens the door.

"Hello, Loki. Lúthien says that your magic could learn the script for our language?"

"It can! It has some user-calibrated settings - important if there's a glitch; I once went around for a while not realizing that it had swapped all gendered words in a certain language, coming and going - and I can add an alphabet."

He delightedly starts showing her the one he invented.

Assuming it corresponds neatly to phonemes, it will be straightforward to add.

It does, with only a few odd exceptions - "The Dwarves were the only ones who adopted it, so I ended up changing things to make more sense for their language, though they won't teach it to us, it's private."

"...oh dear, I hope they haven't been offended by my sounding like I'm speaking it."

"They've presumably been speaking ours with you, they speak it with us. I've never even heard them use theirs, and you went down with Lúthien, right?"

"Yes, but Allspeak renders itself as the native language by default and I didn't know to set it differently. Lúthien would have heard her language, but it would sound different to someone with a different native one. I could give a speech to a linguistically mixed crowd and they'd all understand me."

"Huh. Well, if they weren't glaring bloody murder at you they must have figured it out fast enough. Dwarves have very high resistance to all kinds of spellwork, so they would at least have noticed you were using magic to talk."

"They didn't seem offended, or bring it up at all. How does their magic resistance work?"