Worth a try if the alternative's certain death or, say, 'me doing nothing but heal all day', especially if I can find Ents and hobbits.

I am surprised that my father hasn't asked twenty people to give you oaths and get healing, you healing all day is clearly an insane solution.

It hasn't come up yet and the circumstances of Celebrimbor's oath were a little alarming, but it's probably not a bad idea to have more backups in case I die or am desperately needed for spell purposes a dozen places at once. I did give him the healing spell.

The reason I haven't done it is because I don't want to ask my people for oaths, yes, but that's not Father's reason so i wonder what is. There are better ways to do it than that one - you can ask in private, you can give people a week to give you an answer...

I could give them eight. Announce that I'll distribute the spell next time I come out of the hole to anyone who'll swear accordingly and wants it.

That seems safely not coercive.

Wouldn't guarantee nobody would be elbowing each other about it behind the scenes, but on my part yes.

That'd be nice, wouldn't it.

When I'm in a place I know working with people I know it's almost like it's true. I can give orders fast enough and fine-grained enough to have a thousand projects in the works at once. When I'm cut off from it I feel weirdly contained.

That sounds unpleasant.

I don't want to live my life around 'always have a hundred thousand people answering to me', though, so I'd better get used to it.

I wonder if you could rewire the attentional capacity to work on anything else or if it's people and only people and forever people for you.

My father put a great deal of energy and effort into trying to make it engineering - I was the first, you know, he had hopes - to no avail.

Guess you're just naturally specialized.

There are more than the two things in the world. I could probably do magic embroidery, it'd just be very hard to rule the world with magic embroidery.

Sounds prohibitively difficult to me, impressive though it is.

How do you know palantiri are?

First thing Father wanted to know when he got your science books. He thought they should be and he did some tests with Celebrimbor as soon as Celebrimbor could teleport to the edge of the world, with sufficiently precise time-measuring devices that they both seemed to think they'd have noticed a delay if there were one.

Ah. That's nifty, then, instantaneous communication is a little hard to come by in many parts of the galaxy. People have it but don't like to distribute the strategic advantage.

Palantiri are not trivial but once we figure out a way to mass-produce magic items they will be.

How long do they take to make as-is?

About eighty days of work by someone with osanwë and a few years' training.

So if you wanted lots of them someone could figure out how to make them by sorcery, maybe, but it wouldn't improve the speed if you only wanted another two or three.