"I guessed that it had to be. The problem is not a cultural taboo on eating bugs."

"Oh?"

"The problem is that every food you've given me has been drugged, or poisoned, or the flesh of someone I'd recently watched you murder, and I have no desire to accept food from your hand even when your hand is the whole world."

"Not particularly. It occurred to me you might not have bothered factoring it into the simulation."

Snort. "Well, I have no such fallback assumption, so I honestly don't know if you'll faint mid-flight if you don't eat anything, but if you didn't notice any deterioration over these three days another three days probably isn't going to be the fatal tipping point. Maybe don't fly over the forest with the giant spiders. But if you prefer to be a bird I'll turn you back into a bird."

She turns him into a bird and tosses him into the air.

Safe travels, Loki.

There aren't orcs tied to the fence when she arrives, and the guards are armored.

She lands at the entrance as usual. "Hello. No new orcs today?"

"There was a bit of a problem that regrettably distracted us. You, ah, have encouragement to go invisible. It might be safer. I think Fëanáro will explain things. He's in his workshop."

It's - not cluttered, everything is clearly precisely in its place, but it's a disaster. There's a glowing light on one of the tables, with someone cranking a lever next to it. Fëanáro and Curufinwë are both in the center of the mess, working with what looks like mud.

"Um, what happened and why did the guard think I ought to be invisible?"

"Oh," he says, looking up, "that. I wanted to show you the electricity first. We're practically cheating with this one - it's not really producing light, just getting metal so hot that it glows. I have ideas for how to do better than that, but we thought first we'd build a continual power source - you can stop cranking that, Moryo, I want the wires to give this a try - and the obvious continual power source is the rivers that feed Lake Mithrim, but the electricity dissipates if you try to generate it there and then, say, light one of the greenhouses with plants from Valinor which would benefit from continual light - we think if we cover the wires, that won't happen, but the things we've tried so far aren't helping..."

"Well, I'm very impressed and I'm not actually sure that isn't how lightbulbs are supposed to work, at least one kind of them, although I suppose it might seem like it couldn't be right since you see heat. What have you tried for covering the wires?"

"A few different types of clay, wood pulp, fabric, other metals that are less amenable to electricity running through them than copper, horsehair, water - that's a bit dangerous, turns out - glass."

"Oh, I should have warned you about water, is everyone okay? Is there no rubber available?"

"What's rubber? And we're not generating very much electricity, it did no harm."

"It's... plant-derived in its nonsynthetic form but I couldn't begin to tell you what the tree looks like or how one turns the relevant tree into rubber. Likewise I don't know how to synthesize it. But it's like -" Osanwë is really so useful, she can just wad up sense impressions of "this is how rubber" and lob them at people.

"Wax might work. Why am I invisible and everybody outside armored, what happened?"

He sighs. "You told Maitimo you thought you could identify where our interests diverged and say as much explicitly so it was less exhausting to try to plan around you. Are you interested in doing that now?"