"No, it's fine. No one's going to be able to reach me across the continent anyway."

"All right, but read your transcripts first, I don't want to try to camouflage them while we're flying. This stuff happened -" She pulls out the stuff that happened - "Then I killed a Balrog and discovered I was adopted, it was a fun time -" Post-combat conversations. "Checked on the orcs, visited your family and their new security protocols, cheated outrageously at magic and had a cultural misunderstanding -" She's really accumulated a lot of these. "Discovered said cultural misunderstanding with your cousins, went back and apologized, loitered, altered inventive trajectory for supposedly the next ten years, won't that be impressive - There, you've got something to read while I wander off a bit for safety and try to see if I have ice powers."

He reads. You are actually from a different foreign planet the Valar didn't know existed, and your natural form is a twelve-foot blue thing? That's an elaborate excuse to tell me you're going to start using some new abilities, I'd be fine with just hearing that you learned them.

Yes, that had been a little unfair. Having Findekáno start talking in his head, and then having this many Findekáno transcripts that touch so directly on him, is a little unfair of her, though. He rereads, commits to memory, watches her standing there.

She notices, eventually, having produced no frost powers. "You ready to go? I can do this another time. Might only work if I get up close and personal with another Balrog first and do it while I'm still blue or something."

"I am."

Frustration. No, and I was actually trying. I have mostly been able to manually undo all of the instincts that are unhelpful for this environment, even if it's slow and painful, but those ones won't just come under control - I'm worried they're too grounded in memories, and I am unwilling to get rid of those. In Quendi form I'll be fine for months anyway.

Would the healing song I have be any more effective for starvation than my sorcery spell? I can give you one of those, it can just run all the time if you want.

It might delay it, I suppose. Thank you.

You want it on you or on an object once we land?

What's the lowest volume it works at? If anyone else can hear it, probably better to do on an object.

Haven't extensively tested that; it was all objects and soundproof boxes. If I place the source so it's actually intersecting with you somewhere it'll be muffled to the outside but might still work on you, we can try that when we land?

Ooh, I suppose that while its actual purpose cannot be demonstrated to your satisfaction the mechanism itself would make sense - She explains the shape of the thing. You could probably also run, like, a flour mill off one, purely mechanically, if you didn't want electricity.

He considers for a second. Thank you.

You're welcome. Planning to build the Dwarves one or something?

I am planning to figure out how I can be useful to the Dwarves, build up as much credit with them as I possibly can, and then entreat them to help me build a city. Ideally four or five cities, but one to start with. So my family can't complain it'd be practically inconvenient to move.

I approve of this plan. That's not nearly as manipulative as Macalaurë made it sound.

I think my brothers prefer 'we are helpless in the face of Nelyo's machinations' to 'he's right, and has been right all along, and also we don't even have any ideas for a gesture meaningful enough to actually improve relations with the people we betrayed, so obviously we are going to end up going along with his.'

Even with that face-saving explanation in mind I don't think I would have guessed this one. It's very me, actually. Giving people stuff so they can give other people stuff and so on.

Competent people with the same goal will probably employ many of the same strategies.

Yeah. Hmm, I wonder how many songs I will wind up selling to the Dwarves. I guess I should find out if they have controls against price-fixing; otherwise if I announce that I can sell an unlimited number of forge-songs until I have your room and board covered at negligible marginal cost they might all decide that they're willing to pay only that amount of gold divided by how many of them want one. I could avoid that by just auctioning one off and being unclear about supply but that might annoy them. I should ask one.

If there are other considerations you don't need to sell forge-songs for my expenses; I am fairly certain I will be able to find valuable work.