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You look like you need sleep. And a few days off.

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There were a few minor disputes among the Men last time you were out - I left notes in your room but I will have them delivered to your new one, wherever it is - the sort of problems you'd expect from people not accustomed to such close quarters, complaints about leaving uneaten food in hallways, things like that. I haven't learned all the names and I meant to do that by the time they were all here. I should send a courier to Macalaurë now rather than in three weeks, in case the Enemy is prompted by our haste to his own.

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I'll address the disputes if they haven't been sorted out already. They will not expect you to know all their names; I have a census in my notes because I can't reliably remember all their names. I am not going to write a letter tonight but I think your family is less offended by irregular communication than your cousins, or at least Findekáno.

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I actually find the idea of not knowing peoples' names very alarming. It was one of the first things I learned as a child, everyone knew my name and I didn't know theirs and I felt at some sort of desperate disadvantage.

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Oh. Well, I hope the census helps.

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It has been of tremendous value to me, yes, I've been committing it to memory whenever I have a spare moment.

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Your memory is very impressive.

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People are easy.

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The only thing my memory is that good on is spell pieces, which are engraved indelibly in my head via Tesseract-given supernatural power - I tried osanwëing a letter to Lúthien and she received it but it didn't click.

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Inconvenient. Next time you can ask the Tesseract to give you transmissible superpowers.

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Somebody could maybe use one of my spells if they could at least mostly memorize several thousands of pages of otherwise contentless-to-them information. It's no wonder that regular sorcerers work in lower-fidelity chunks, nothing else would be tractable.

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Father could do it.

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Would it be worth his time? Or for that matter mine?

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Depends very much on how much time we have. Probably not, unless there are unexpected barriers to interdimensional teleportation and once he's finished your memory device - oh, your memory device might also make spells perfectly memorable.

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It might, and then it'd just be a question of transmission time. ...In spite of everything I'm a little hesitant to open that can of worms.

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You don't want us to have your abilities?

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I'd give out, say, the healing spells without hesitation - but I am pretty sure that if I spend long enough picking at it I can make a spell to do absolutely anything and I can't be sure that I wouldn't pass that along too, if someone else had the alphabet and remembered and understood it the way I do.

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Well. There are a lot of very very monumental tasks ahead of us, and you may not be able to do them all yourself and may be less of a target if destroying you does not put them permanently outside reach.

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Yeah. I'm not guaranteeing it will never look like the best plan, just - way scarier than teaching people how to build nukes.

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I can imagine my father doing terrible wrongs with nukes. I do not think it's likely and I plan to make it impossible but I can imagine it. I actually cannot conceive of him ever doing those sort of wrongs with phenomenal cosmic powers.

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My powers are not cosmic at this time. They'll take a while to get that way.

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Dead Men aren't in Mandos. We need to get them back. Dead Elves and orcs are in Mandos and he will object to a rescue. The orcs will still be sworn to enmity with us. Eru might have other pet projects like this, might have thousands of them. My father would have a decided tendency to put all of those on his personal priorities list and not even consider whether any of them could be done in parallel, but some of them we only get one shot at and I've always thought of that tendency as one of his profound weaknesses.

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I know. Believe me, I know. I offered to try teaching Sigyn once, though without the probably necessary benefit of telepathy - but the threshold of trust is astronomical -

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We have a convenient mechanism for trust. I am now even more reluctant to have you destroy it.

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You don't have a mechanism for trust in the way I mean. You have a mechanism for - nondistrust.

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