"When can we expect you to be capable of traveling between dimensions at will?"

"Low end fifty years, high end two hundred, if it takes me longer than that I may have a sufficiently fundamental problem that I have to stop actual spellcraft and instead spend a few decades doing physics experiments to compensate for the fact that here I can't just look things up in a sufficiently advanced library but I currently don't anticipate that unless Melian was lying to me."

"Well. We appreciate that we're getting a bit of warning, at least, but that doesn't seem nearly enough time to be useful to anything in an apparently vast and disinterested galaxy."

"It depends a lot on who finds you, but if you get benign trading-inclined people in the first place - which seems to be the scenario you're most interested in preparing for and is probably the scenario you are best able to prepare for - the things that you'll be able to distribute that they'll want, without running yourselves out of natural resources they could get elsewhere, are intellectual property type things. Fiction, history, even recipes, it might be a workable scenario if a bunch of anthropologists got very protective of you and wouldn't let anybody else bother you because they wanted to study your culture in its untouched state - which might be patronizing but is otherwise pretty harmless."

"We have no interest in being the subject of outside study in that way."

"Then I will try not to tell any anthropologists you exist. I'm really not planning to deliberately open floodgates to unfiltered visitation, but I don't want to stay cut off from my original galaxy forever and also find it likely that the most efficient way to stop the Enemy is to import something to throw at him."

"The Elves' enemy?"

"I didn't have the impression he was nice to anybody at all, even his own orcs, but yes."

"We haven't really interacted with him at all or seen anything for which he is particularly responsible, save a few battles with the Elves in which both sides were disinclined to discuss terms. And we take Elf stories with some skepticism. But we would be interested in hearing the events that led you to also regard him as an enemy."

"Well, he kidnaps and tortures and mind-controls and forcibly breeds Elves to generate his orc troops, all of whom are in constant pain until I heal them and are forced as children to take unbreakable oaths - do Dwarves have those? - to serve him. I consider this behavior pretty inexcusable."

"The Elves should really have opened with that instead of telling us how he defies Eru," the questioner agrees gravely. "We do not have unbreakable oaths; we have contract law. It works better."

"The newcomer elves are much more about the inexcusable behavior than the defiance," Loki says. "Contract law definitely seems to have superior downside potential; I am leery of the oath concept but it affects Elves and orcs both."

"The newcomer Elves sound in every respect superior to the ones we've been acquainted with. Is there no judicial procedure for adjudicating oaths, or declaring them void?"

"The way it was described to me is that the species who can do oaths 'do not have free will' and are therefore just sort of... fating themselves to do what they swear to do. I haven't actually asked if death releases them; they supposedly have an afterlife, although a Vala-administered one of very dubious quality, from which they can return to life if the Vala in question lets them. Other than that they seem to be genuinely irrevocable and trying to break them causes extreme, devastating depression which can only be alleviated by taking up the sworn task again. And they work when little children speak them. It's... it's a serious flaw in the species design, the oaths thing. The saving grace for the orcs is that if they're caught alive and in a cooperative mood - healing helps with that - they can be convinced of redefinitions of a few words and from there reuse their coerced wording to mean something less inherently antagonistic."

Nods. "There are many serious flaws in the species design. I'd take them up with the designers, but until this moment I assumed that the gods of Elves were as real as the gods of Men."

"I'd take them up with the designers but I'm assured that if I flew to Valinor and yelled the result would not be chastened Valar."

"If there are weapons that'd change the result there," someone says mildly, "we'd be happy to develop them."

"Ha. I'm not sure what it'd take to kill a Vala but I'm planning to find out with Morgoth. Possibly from there the next step will be threatening his peers into behaving themselves, if they're even capable of responding to threats."

"That seems reasonable."

"I pride myself on being reasonable." Gosh, Loki likes Dwarves. These are good Dwarves.

They seem reasonably fond of her as well. "So, aside from encouragement to take a more active role in the Elves' war, and a hundred years' advance notice that we may be acquiring very powerful neighbors, what concerns of yours seem likely to be concerns of this council?"

"I rescued someone from Morgoth who needs a place to stay for a few years and would like to bring him here. And while I was not anticipating the nature of this trip, I have a general education in the advances of my culture, much of which is new to you and may be useful even in piecemeal form."

"Elves have traditionally been ill at ease in our company. We have divergent perspectives on topics such as timeliness, religion, and occasions where singing is appropriate."

"Well, this one is one of the newcomer's crowd, which may help with the religion item; he's been good about keeping appointments with me of a kind where I tell him what day I'll be there and he's exactly where I expect him whenever during that day I happen to arrive; and I have never heard him sing and suspect he will not be in the mood."

"In that case by all means. I'm sure there are ways Elves can make themselves useful," though he sounds rather dubious. "We'd be honored to host any guests who are friends of yours, whatever our assessment of whether they'll appreciate the favor."