"That seems likely to solve the problem wherein the Valar can't be permanently halted."

"Yes. And last I heard people were skeptical that he could take a lightning strike, so I'm optimistic that a sun or a black hole would do it."

"I don't think a lightning strike would kill my mother. Wreck her physical form, maybe, but she'd assemble a new one. But I haven't seen the Enemy, so if the person who said that has..."

"I don't know if she has. Maybe not. It came up in the context of speculating what would have happened if my sister had landed instead of me; my sister's hammer can control its own inertia and call thunderstorms and direct lightning."

"Hopefully she would be wiser than to immediately challenge Angband?"

"...Deciding not to challenge things isn't a strength of hers. And she wouldn't be inventing spells in her downtime, anyway, so waiting wouldn't advantage her as it can me."

"She sounds like an interesting person."

"She is. But I'm glad she didn't come here in my place."

"I always wanted a sister."

"Your parents preferred to stop at one?"

"My mother found it exhausting to spend a whole year making sure she had the right heart rate and blood pressure and internal biochemistry. The Maiar don't usually take biological forms to the necessary level of detail. I don't think she'd have even done one, if my father wasn't heartbroken - he always had wanted a big family..."

"Some places they have ways to incubate children outside their mothers... I don't know how that would affect the magical inheritance, though, she might not like to be the first to try it."

"I think they'd have been all right with Elven children. I was never sure how much of their conviction I was perfect was just the ordinary fondness of a parent for their child, and how much the fact I am...something new in Arda."

"I'm not sure if the process would end up with Quendi children either. Quendi are... not very biological compared to most people. Although if it were going to fail at that level a technician would probably be able to tell immediately."

"The childbearing process, after conception, involves both parents nourishing the fea of the child with their own. Both the mother and father definitely have to be present for the whole year, but the father does it without contact, so perhaps the mother does as well."

"I wouldn't know anything about that. What's a fea?"

"It's - the aspect of us that isn't physical, that isn't destroyed when we die."

"Ah. Another Quendi convenience. I have no idea if external gestation would interfere or not."

"I'm sorry, I'm distracting you from either working on your spell or talking about your sister, both of which are more interesting than our divergent biologies at least until we can teleport and try the things your people have."

Loki shoos the notes aside. She conjures an illusion of Thor. "Missing some colors, you can see two I can't, but this is Thor. The very picture of the ideal Asgardian princess, maybe minus a few centuries of growing the rest of the way up."

"She is pretty," Lúthien says. "She has very kind eyes and she looks like she'd inspire her guards to practice with the longbow more."

"...Does that have some subtext I'm missing?"

"Not...I don't think so? She looks very physically fit. Whoever was in charge of protecting her would be embarrassed if she were better at the job than they were, so they'd train very hard."

"No one's in charge of protecting her in particular - we haven't had personal guards since we were little; it'd be admitting that we weren't living up to the standards of combat-readiness - and if they were, she would be better at their job than them." The illusion of Thor shrinks and she and a non-Mjolnir practice hammer knock three cooperating opponents across the room inside of eight seconds with perfect form and an enormous grin. Her friends roll to their feet and laugh ruefully.

Lúthien looks transfixed. "She's talented. They let you fight?"