"Uh huh." He stands. "I'll go get the bow now. Can you put an illusion dot on the door of this building?"

"How big do you want it?"

He holds his fingers about an inch apart. "Though, needless to say, you needn't be as accurate as I am to be deadly."

"I'm aware." She heads out. She leaves a dot on the building. She turns invisible, and heads for the orcs.

They're sitting crosslegged on the floor of one of the large new buildings on the side of the lake.

In she goes. "Hi there."

"Oh, no, no, it's all fine," Loki says. "They're jumpy because there's some other Quendi who don't get along with these ones and the others did a stupid thing that made it look like they were trying to start a fight. You did right. But you don't have to stay here any longer; the ruler of a city south of here says you can stay -" She pulls out her map. "We're here. You can stay here, while they ask one of the more attentive Valar if he'll make trouble for you if you cross the ocean to this island, here, and if he says he'll stay out of the way the island's all yours, and if he decides he's going to be uncooperative you can just stay here." Point, point, point. "The Quendi in this city are very nice and very sensible; they'll be nervous of you but you won't be right on top of them so they'll have a chance to calm down without making a fuss about it."

"Oh, good," she says. "Oh, good. Our own place, not working for anyone. Praise Melkor."

"Mm-hm. And there's an alternate plan for getting the horses where they need to go, so you don't need to wait for that."

"Can we leave now?"

"I don't see why not. Here, have a copy of the map -" She puts it on paper, color-codes the key locations. "Do you need to pack anything?"

They all shake their heads vigorously. "We know how to live off the land," Vár says, "did it all the time when we served the false Melkor."

"Do you have a plan for what to do if you run into Quendi on your way and they don't know about you?"

"...run away?"

"That's a good idea. I could also make you not look like orcs until you get there, if that seems like it would make it easier to avoid fights, but you probably still shouldn't talk to random Quendi you meet because you won't be fluent in each other's languages."

"Yeah, that'd be good. Even if they are suspicious of us they probably won't shoot at people who look like Quendi."

"Any requests or should I just make things up?"

They have a lot of opinions about what kind of Quendi they want to look like, it turns out. Everything from height to hair color to skin tone to clothing.

Loki accommodates their designs and supplies mirrors so they can check her work.

Tyelcormo knocks on the door while they're checking out their new appearances in the mirror. He's holding a very tall longbow. "It occurred to me we should offer to send a team south with them - not enough people to fight off any real threats, but enough to navigate interactions with other Elves, and they can say hello to Círdan and bring the first crates of food. Will they be comfortable with that?"

"What do you say, company on the way south?" Loki asks the orcs.

"And it'd mean that if you had trouble running away from somebody you'd have someone along who could talk to them," Loki says.